Authors: Andre Norton
The melon was just at the proper stage of ripeness and I did feast on its rosy, juicy interior, inelegantly, having to spit out seeds into my hand and make a small heap of them to one side. Shining black they were. When i had been very small I had been given a coarse needle and a length of stout linen thread and had spent the whole of an absorbed morning making myself a brave necklace of just such seeds, which Harta the cook had saved for me.
Harta—she had not been one of those who had come together with us in the hills after the escape from Ithdale. So many had been lost! I wondered if some intelligence somewhere decided who would win through, who would never be seen again—or were their lives a blind gamble of fate?
I went to wash my face and hands at the spring, wipe them on sunwarmed grass, paying no attention—outwardly—to the cats who had apparently both gone to sleep in the sun. With a little more confidence than I had had to stiffen me during my first visit to the keep, I once more entered the great hall with those strange cat-shaped benches. This time I did not head for the corner tower—rather I took the other direction.
There, in the deepest gloom of this chamber, I found a huge fireplace, darkened on hearth and up the cavern of an interior with the signs of smoke and soot. Its presence suggested that the builders here had been at least human enough to need heat in the chill of winter and that the Waste was no more hospitable at that season than the seaward-reaching Dales.
On the wide and heavy overmantel, where a lord of the Dales would have had carven the badge of his house, there was a symbol deep wrought—one I had seen before. It was of the circular body with widespread wings. Save that here it was dull and time-stained, hardly to be distinguished in the poor light. On either side of it was set, on guard, the figure of a cat.
There were drifts of dried leaves, powdering into dust, on the hearth, but any remains of a welcoming fire long gone. I remained there for a moment, then let my eyes range about the room, trying to imagine how it had once been—who had held high feast days here, if such were known to these people who had drawn their stools and chairs closer to the flames in winter. What stories had their songsmiths wrought to keep their minds encased in wonder?
Had
they had songsmiths to take their heroes’ acts and make them live in song and tale?
I raised my hand high, striving to touch the symbol, and discovered that even when I stood on tiptoe it was still above my reach. At first I had thought it near invisible against the dull stone in which it was carved. Now . . . I blinked, rubbed the back of my hand across my eyes. The cats . . . they were far more easy to study—there was a glint of fire in their wide-open, staring eyes.
Was it some illusion of the dusk caught within this room, or could it be that one of those heads was slightly larger, heavier of jowl, than the other? I looked from left to right and back again, began to believe that my guess was correct. The cat heads were not in duplicate, but individual. Also I believed I had seen them before, mounted on living, breathing bodies, lying at sleepy ease out in the courtyard. Some worker in stone long ago had caught both male and female; the same animals? Even with all the tricks and talents of the Waste I could hardly accept that the two I saw outside had been those whose portraits were sculptured here. Time might stretch long for the Old Ones (and were any Old Ones
animals?),
but surely not to that extent. If these were not the portraits of the same cats, they must be distant forefather and foremother and the strain had held true.
I stepped into the cavernous mouth of the fireplace, kicking at the leaves, hoping against hope to turn up some piece of the metal, the fire dogs that had once supported the burning wood, some other fragment that would be promising. There was nothing left.
To my right a doorway in the inner wall led to whatever survived at the other end of the building. Deserting the fireplace with its knowing guard cats, I passed through that. The hall beyond was wide enough to be a gallery and here lay the first signs of furnishing I had seen, other than the stone cat benches. All I wanted!
With a cry, I sped forward, to snatch at the black-tarnished hilt of a sword. Only to find that what I held when I pulled it from out the litter on the floor was a jagged stub. I tried it against one finger, the metal flaked away thinly. There were other weapons lying along the wall as if they had fallen from stone pegs, which were still set there. Nothing had survived that could be used. At last in my disappointment I sent the stuff flying, with a kick that shattered it even more into a dust of rust.
There was another square room beyond, a second stair like unto the one I had found in the outlook tower. I judged that this must serve the second tower I had noted earlier—the one that supported a living tree in place of the lord's banner. The steps appeared secure enough, as long as one crowded against the wall on the left, so I climbd.
On the second floor there was another doorway, as well as the continuation of the steps leading upward, and I judged that the doorless opening gave upon rooms that must have been built above the arms gallery. I took that way now in turn.
Another hall here but a very much narrower one, hardly more than a passage where perhaps two of my own girth could walk abreast, and, to my left, three doorways.
There had been doors here also—two of them, like the one in the courtyard, showed rotted bits of wood, the fallen debris, that had once formed barriers. But the one in the middle . . .
The wood of that looked firm and whole. I could detect no crack brought about by time, no skim of rust upon the metal fittings. There was a locking bar across it—from the outside! Had I come across such precaution on the lower floor, or in whatever cellars might be found in this place (I had no desire to go prying into such as those), I would have said this was a prison. It was perhaps a “safe” chamber such as some lords had for the protection of their more valuable belongings when they were from home, save that the bar lacked any of the ponderous locking devices usually in use on such.
I went forward very slowly to touch the wood above that bar, half expecting to have it crumble. Against the pressure of my hand as I applied more strength, it had a very solid feeling. There was no one to forbid me to draw that bar, and the shaft itself looked as if it lay lightly in the two loops through which it rested. At last, after some hesitation (I must not surrender to any fear), I knew I had to learn why one door in all the deep remained in the same condition it must have been when the building was at its most complete, the bar still sturdy, while elsewhere armor and weapons flaked away to the touch. There are many legends of how curiosity brought into peril those of the Dales who were unable to resist mysteries left by the Old Ones. At that moment I could understand the need that had driven those unfortunates, for I was under just such a compulsion to draw the bar that I could no longer fight it. Draw I did.
Perhaps it was the bar alone that, by some trick of its makers, had kept the door intact. For, as I pulled it to one side, and the door itself began to swing slowly toward me, cracks appeared in its surface, ran with a speed I could follow by my eyes, over the wood. There was a grating, a puff of stale air blown outward. The door slipped drunkenly on one hinge as the other snapped with sound sharp enough to make me start.
Half open, the door was fast falling into the same sorry condition as its two neighbors to the right and left. Pieces of the wood broke, crumbled in dusty puffs as they hit the stone pavement.
I shrank as that disintegration began, but now that it appeared to cease, with a last clatter, as the bar finally fell and snapped in two, I made myself edge forward to look into the room beyond.
I had only a moment or so to see—to look upon what had been sealed from time until I rashly had let in the years, and age itself wrecked, with fury, whatever the spell (I was sure I had broken a spell) had protected.
This room had not been bare. There were tapestries on the wall, and, though I saw their splendor only for two or three of the breaths I had drawn in wonder, they were so rich I could not believe that any human hand or hands had been able to stitch such. There was a bed, with a tall canopy, the posts of which were seated cats, each taller than myself. On the bed lay rich coverings of a tawny yellow like the fur of the cats, which grayed into ash brown, then were gone, as were the coverings on the floor. A table had stood against one wall and on it a mirror, its carved frame topped by a cat's head. On that table were boxes—whose richness I had very little time to see, other things gone fast to dust before I could identify them.
Were there chairs, stools, a tall, upright wardrobe chest such as might hold gowns any keep lady would find herself hot with desire even to hold? I am sure there were. I am certain I can remember having a hasty glimpse of such. I had not stepped across the threshold; I only stood and watched a glory that made me ache for its beauty become suddenly nothing. Windows were revealed now as the curtains that had been drawn across them withered away far faster even than a delicate flower can wither if it is left in the full light of the sun, having been idly plucked for no real purpose.
The light from those windows streamed in (there appeared to be no curtaining vine outside here). In its beans, the dust motes dance a thousand fold. Then . . . there was nothing—just nothing at all . . .
No, that was not true.
In the midst of one of those shining panels of sunlight there was a gleam, something that appeared to catch the sun and then reflect it forth again, not in a hard glitter but in a soft glow. I hesitated to cross that chamber. Only, just as I had been unable to resist opening the spell-locked door, so I could not now stop myself.
The dust was very thick. I coughed, waved my hands before my face, strove to clear the air that I might breathe long enough to reach what lay in the
mote-clogged sunbeam. When my
boot toe near-nudged it, I stooped to pick up a ring.
Unlike the rest of the metal in the room it had not flaked into nothingness. The band felt as firm as if it had been fashioned only yesterday. But the setting was unlike any stone I had ever seen in my life. We of the Dales are poor in precious things. We have a little gold, washed out of streams, we have amber, which is greatly prized. A few of the very wealthy lords may have for their wearing at high feast days some colored gems from overseas. But those are mainly small, polished but uncut. I held now something far different from those.
The stone (if stone it was) was near the size of my thumb, though the hoop which held it was small, clearly meant for a woman's wearing. This gem or stone had not been cut, nor did it need to be polished. For it had been fashioned by some freakish twist of nature herself into the semblance of a cat's head and the surface was neither pink, nor yellow, but a fusing of the two with an iridescent cast to the surface, over which rainbow lights slipped
as I
turned it
this way and that. I slipped
the band over my finger. It was as if it clung there, made for no other's wearing—also it felt as if it were in its rightful place at long last.
Moving closer to the window I turned my hand this way and that, marveling at such a thing showing against the brownness of my skin where the scratches of berry briars drew many rough lines. I did not know what it was but—it was mine! I was sure of that as if the ring had been slipped solemnly on that finger in some formal gifting. Once more I turned it again for the sun to catch it fair, then I heard . . .
A yowling arose, so sharp and clear it could have come from immediately below my window. I was looking out, down the slope toward the road. Both the cats were leaping from stone to stone, winding about bushes, disappearing, as they made their way through the jumble of ruins and stone that lay there below.
Beyond . . . there was a rider on the road! A rider! I saw sun flare in bluish gleam, small and far away—a mailed rider. He whom the cats had said would come? Kerovan?
Forgetting everything but what had drawn me for so many days, t turned and ran, dust rising up above me in a cloud that set me choking and gasping, but still I ran. I must know who rode the white highway. I could guess, I could hope—but I must know!
Kerovan
T
HAT JOISAN WAS HERE BESIDE THE WHITE HIGHWAY OF THE OLD
ones—not trapped in dark and danger—was the only thought that filled my mind. Then she was in my arms, and I held her with such a grip as would keep her sale against the worst the Dark might send against us—so would I keep her as long as my strength lasted.
She was crying, her face wet with tears, as her hands closed on my shoulders in a grasp I could feel even through my mail. I forgot all the thoughts that had ridden me through long hard days, as i bent my head to find her lips, tasting the salt of her tears. A fire arose and raged through me as we so clung, forgetting all else but each other.
Only such moments cannot last. I loosed her a little, remembering who I was and why this great joy might not continue for me. This was a time when once more I must don inner armor, not for my protection, but hers.
If my hold loosened, hers did not. She only pushed back a fraction so that she might look directly into my face as her sobs came as ragged and uneven breaths.
“Kerovan—truly Kerovan . . .” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.
Kerovan—my name completed the breaking of the spell. I moved to put her away from me but she would not let me. Rather she shook her head from side to side as might a child who refuses to give up something upon which she has set her heart's desire.
“No, you shall not leave me again! You were here—now you try to go—but you shall not!”
I
was
here? What did she mean? Then the warmth still consuming me made that plain. The husk that had been Kerovan now held life. All my good intentions, my knowing this was wrong, that I was tainted—they were threatened by that warmth, by her words . . .
Setting my teeth I raised my hands to her wrists. By main strength I must break her hold, push her away from me. Still she shook her head. Now she also writhed in my hold, fought me as if she had been one of the tawny cats.
“No!” Her denial arose louder. “Do you not understand? You shall never be free of me—you cannot. We—we must be—”
Her voice faltered. I do not know what expression my face wore, but hers became one of growing despair. Then her shoulders slumped, her hands went limp in my grasp. It was she who edged away.
“Let me go,” she said in a low voice. “I shall not trouble you so again. I thought that . . .” Her voice trailed off; she raised one hand to smear it across her cheeks. Then she flung back her head, tossing her disordered hair out of her eyes, away from her face.
I could not answer, it took all my resolution to curb the rebellious desire within me. I could only stand—alone. Her chin lifted, strength of purpose shone from her eyes. There was that in her carriage, her voice—such will and self-confidence—which would provide a safeguard as strong as the armor and leather she wore.
“I have no pride,” she said, even when every inch of her taut, straight body, proclaimed her right to that. “I listen to your voice saying, ‘You are not my lady, I have no wish to be your lord'—but I cannot accept those words as a woman should. So I come after you because—only with you, Kerovan, am I a person in whom I can believe. Therefore, if you deny me again, and ride on for whatever mission Imgry has set you—and how is it that
such
as he dares say ‘do this and do that’ to
you
—I shall follow. Even if you are sworn to his service.”
As she studied me through slightly narrowed eyes, I could not even yet find the power of tongue to answer her. If I could not command my inner self, how then could I man my defenses against her? Not with this wild mutiny growing within me.
I shook my head, glad in a small way to be able to answer a lesser question.
“I swore no oath.” I found
those
words easily enough. “I came at my own will. Had it not been my choice I would not have ridden forth.”
Perhaps then, because I was so glad to find an excuse not to meet her personal challenge. I spoke of my mission—of what Imgry had learned about Alizon's search for a “power.”
To my relief she listened with growing interest.
“And what success have you had in marshalling any of the Waste?”
I told her of the Wereriders.
“So—and now whom do you seek?” she asked.
J drew a ragged breath and shook my head. Instead I told her of my return to my camp, of the devastation I found there. At my mention of Elys and Jervon, she put out her hands, catching at my arm.
“Then they live—were left above ground! I thought—I hoped— that might be so.”
I had a question of my own. “Where were you?”
She moved back a little, her hands busy now with her hair. For the first lime I became aware of a rising wind, the fact that the sun had gone behind clouds. She frowned at the sky.
“There is a storm coming. You can feel it in the air. Up there"—she pointed to the rough, steep slope—"there is shelter— come!”
I could find no reason to refuse. Leading the mare and the pony. I followed her. For the first time I remembered the cats. There was no sign of them now.
The ascent was not an easy one, and above the clouds grew ever thicker and darker. As we rounded the side of a wall and entered into a courtyard the first drops of rain began to fall. Lashes of lightning cracked across the sky to the west. The roll of thunder was heavier than the nimble of Alizon war machines crowding through the throat of some narrow dale.
I loosed the pack pony and the mare from their burdens, Joisan stooped to catch up a share of the bags and packs, helping to draw these into a dark chilly hall. She caught at a smaller pack from the pony.
“Elys's thought—I am glad of this. But where is she? And Jervon? Did you send them away—or did they deem me dead and . . .”
“It was when we came to that road. Only this morning she said that they would travel no farther—for some reason that was forbidden. A Wisewoman who carries a sword is a thing I had never heard of. She cannot be of the Dales—'’
“If it were meant that they should not come, she would know, of course. No, she is not of the Dales—nor the Waste either— her parents came from a wreck on the coast. And, though she was born here, her blood is strange.”
Gloom of near-night darkness came quickly with the rush of rain outside. Her face was only a blur to me.
“She has power,” Joisan was continuing. “And Jervon"—for a moment she paused, then continued in an even tone—"he accepts her for what she is. He is not the less in her eyes, nor she the greater in his. They are two halves well-fitted together to form something stronger than either, This may not happen easy or often, but when it does . . . Ah. then it is as if both have found a treasure—a treasure beyond dreams of other men!”
There was a ring of something close to defiance in her tone. I knew I must not confront her again on this subject, which lay heavy in both our minds. Instead I asked once more what had happened after the earth swallowed her.
So I heard the strange tale of her being caught in thick dark and hunted through that dark by the Thas. Also of how the gryphon had been her salvation.
“I do not know just how it was awakened to my aid. Somehow the strength of my will, my need, brought it to life. It was the light that showed me the door into a place—a very strange place.”
She spoke then of a chamber wherein lay a maze of low waHs, of how she had won to the center of that having perceived a pattern. In the middle she had taken refuge and fallen asleep—or into the web of another sorcery—and had awakened outside this keep.
“There was fruit and water here . . .” Before I could move she dashed out again into the courtyard, returned near as swiftly, laughing and shaking raindrops from her hair, bringing with her a melon, which she dumped on the floor between us.
“Give me your knife. Mine—all my weapons—were taken from me in the dark.” Joisan plucked my knife from the belt sheath to slash open the melon. She pressed half of it into my hands.
The fruit was sweet, filled with juice—better than I could ever remember eating—bringing comfort to my mouth and throat. I produced in turn a cake of journey bread which we also shared—Joisan having gone to wash her hands in the fall of water beyond the door, shaking them as dry as she could.
“There are more of these—and berries, water plants—I did not go hungry once I reached here.”
“And the cats?”
Joisan had settled herself cross-legged beside me, well within touching distance, only her hands lay loosely together on one knee. She made no move to reach out to me.
“Yes, the cats. You may not believe this, Kerovan, but those two are not animals as we know them. They understand one's thoughts and speech and mind-speak in return. There is—was, for I have not seen him since my first coming—also a small bear who can do likewise. The cats told me to wait, that one was coming. I climbed the tower and saw the road. But I wonder . . .” I saw her lift one hand now and regard it closely. Then she held out that hand to me and asked a question.
“Kerovan, you have been much more up and down the Dales than I. Have you seen the like of this before?”
I could see, even through the storm gloom, that there was a ring on one finger of the hand she had raised. Though I did not want—feared now—any touch contact with her, I did take that hand in mine and brought it closer that I might see the ring.
The stone was an irregularly shaped gem of some kind. And, oddly enough, once I had taken her hand in mine it became more visible, so that I could see the hue of the stone (if stone it truly was). It was unlike any color I had seen—both rose and yellow—the colors melting into one another.
“Kerovan!”
I did not need that alerting cry of my name. I had taken her hand in my right one. On my wrist, the band half-hidden by the drooping of the mail shirt was bright and clear, shining so that its light reached the strange ring and seemed to feed the gem. Thus its own glow grew the greater.
Joisan freed herself from the hold I had unintentionally tightened, brought her hand and the ring up breast high so that the gem near-touched the crystal gryphon. But there was no reaction from that talisman and Power-holder.
She put up the fingers of her other hand as if she would catch at the gem-set hoop, tear it off, and then she stopped.
“It contains no harm, I think . . .” she said slowly. “Perhaps you cannot see it clearly. But the stone itself is shaped in the form of a cat's head, though it was not cut so by men. The cats—”
“You are sure they are real?”
“Not hallucinations? You saw them for yourself—they are as real as this!” She held out her hand once again. “Did you believe them illusions when they stopped you on the road?”
“No.” I was sure—whatever those two beasts might be, whomever they might serve (if servants they were)—I was certain they were real. I had been led to this place for a purpose even as Elys had suggested. I wanted to banish that conclusion, but I could not.
“Where did you gel that?”
She told me of her explorations of the ruined keep in which we now sheltered, of a barred door—barred on the outside— where within until she had, as she said, “let the years in,” there had existed a reminder of the past in furnishings. And of how all had vanished into dust before her eyes, leaving only the ring in a pool of sunlight.
It was such a tale as a songsmith might devise, but I believed every word of it.
“I have never seen its like . . .” I began slowly. “This"—I fingered the wrist band—"suggests it has some tie with Power.”
“There are many things in the Waste—is that not what our legends always say? Somehow I think that this was meant—” She glanced at me—or at least she turned her head a fraction in my direction though it was too dark to see her expression. “Was meant,” she repeated, “to be found when the door was opened. But why such a spell was ever laid and its meaning . . .”
“It is not of the Dark.”
“I know,” she agreed simply, her hand once more caressing the gryphon at her breast. “This would have warned me. It is very beautiful—and strange—and the way that it came . . . I feel it is a gift.”
There was a hint of defiance in her tone as if she believed that I would urge her to throw the ring from her. But that was not in my thoughts. There had been so little of beauty for Joisan since she and her people had fled Ithdale—and perhaps even during the years before. I had been able to give her no bride gift except the gryphon—and that too had come by chance out of the Waste. I wished for a moment of sorrow that the ring had been my gift, also—a thing for her to cherish.
I had searched blindly for Joisan and I had found her—no thanks to any real effort of my own. Such fortune was only barely possible. That I had been helped, or guided, in the right direction by some other intelligence—that explanation seemed to me a little more credible. That was a bitter conclusion and one I did not want to accept. I . . . perhaps we . . . were caught up in—in whose web . . . and why?
That we must remain together from now on I must also probably accept, for I was now without any guide to take us out of the Waste and I could not let her go alone—in fact I knew she would not.
Which meant I must speedily regain my inner armor, make myself believe that any close feeling between us was wrong, that if I yielded now—the easy choice—it would be worse for her.
I remained wary of even the smallest hint of surrender to that other self. I had fought so hard to contain my desires, my longings. Even now that struggle rose anew in me and I ached throughout my body for Joisan to come into my arms once more.
By her own efforts, and with no help from me, she had escaped worse danger than I had faced for a long time. I did not want to think ahead—that we two might be led into new perils. As my thoughts so twisted and curled, and I forced them into hard conclusions, she spoke again.
“This is not a place of peace, such as one finds even in the Dales. I was in one of those once, Kerovan—the night Toross brought me out of the invaders’ hands at the taking of Ithdale. That was a place of wonder . . . and he died there. So I have always known in my heart that he rests easy. This does not hold anything except many years of time's dust. Still we are safe here—as the cats promised. Do you not also feel that is so?”