Land of the Burning Sands (30 page)

Tonight the sunset had piled up in rich purple and gold in the west; heavy golden light lanced through breaks in the towering clouds and set the river alight with reflected glory, poured across the rolling fields on the other side of the river, and turned every stalk of ripening grain to rich gold.

In this light, the griffin, too, looked like it had been fashioned by some tremendously skilled craftsmaster. The long feathers of its wings might have been made of black iron and red copper, its lion pelt of the smoldering coals that glow at the heart of a fire. Its savage beak and talons flashed like metal. The sun threw its shadow out across the river, but its shadow was made of light, of fire, and was not a real shadow at all. Tehre thought it looked altogether beautiful, but almost more like a clockwork mechanism than a living creature; she was half inclined to look for the cords that suspended it from the sky.

The griffin was soaring like a great eagle, wings stretched out wide and still, seeming to rest suspended in the air. Its motionlessness added to the illusion that it was not really alive. It looked a little, Tehre thought, like a butterfly in amber, for the light that surrounded it seemed richer and heavier and somehow more concentrated than the sunlight that fell across fields and road and river. It did not seem to notice them; it did not seem to notice anything. It was moving fast, its fierce eagle’s glare fixed on the river before it. But then, as the griffin whipped past the campsite, it suddenly turned its head and looked with swift intensity at the travelers who, frozen with astonishment, stared back at it. Its eyes were black and fierce and utterly unreadable. Tehre wondered what it saw and whether to it they looked like they were not quite like living creatures.

Then it was past, gone. The sun dipped below the distant horizon. It was suddenly, comprehensively, dark. For a long moment, despite the light of the half-dozen campfires various travelers had lit, it seemed that the griffin had carried all the light of the world away with it.

There was a long, fraught silence. Then a sudden babble of voices, everyone in the campsite speaking at once, asking one another what they’d seen and what it meant and had it really been a griffin and what did that mean and would it come back and what would it do if it did return? Everyone in Lord Bertaud’s camp was asking the same questions, too. Except, Tehre saw, for the lord himself. The foreigner was not paying any attention to anyone else. His expression was set and blank, as unreadable as the griffin’s. He was standing perfectly still, staring steadily downriver after the griffin.

J
ust at dawn, Beguchren led Gereint out to the inn’s small, empty courtyard and stood watching with bland patience as their horses were saddled and brought out. None of the inn’s few other guests was up quite yet, though the inn staff were stirring about their morning tasks. A girl, bringing fresh loaves back to the inn from some local baker, timidly came over to offer them a loaf. She didn’t dare speak to Beguchren, but gave the warm bread to Gereint, along with a shy smile. And the innkeeper himself came out of the stable along with the boys who led Beguchren’s black mares, having personally assured that the horses would be ready no matter the early hour. Probably that story about the dead brigands they’d left a few miles south had assured attentive service. Though, at that, Beguchren’s imperturbable calm and expensive rings might have been enough.

So they left the ferry landing almost as they had entered it, in pale, shadowy light. The river was still all but invisible in the dimness, just perceptible as a black smooth ribbon and a ripple of sound. The fat crescent of the moon still stood overhead, with the Twin Daughters glimmering by one of its sharp tips.

That was the moment when they saw their first griffins. It had never occurred to Gereint that the griffins would leave their desert to venture this far into the country of men. But he saw at once that Beguchren was not surprised.

There were five griffins. They were flying high, so high they might almost have looked like eagles, except somehow they didn’t look anything like eagles. Even at this distance, the sunlight struck off them as though they were made of gold and copper and bronze, but that wasn’t why they caught the eye. There was something else, something about the way the sky glinted and changed above them, something about the way the wind itself almost seemed to glitter as it tangled in the feathers of their wings. They flew as geese fly in the fall: in a narrow spearhead formation. They traveled in a long curving arc that carried them from the southwest away to the east and north. They could not be coming from their desert, not from the southwest. But if they were returning to it, then they were strangely far east, and heading more easterly still.

Gereint stared after the griffins until they vanished into the far reaches of the distance and then pulled his gaze, with some effort, from the sky and turned to Beguchren.

The mage was not looking at him. He was gazing steadily into the sky after the griffins. His expression was as blandly inscrutable as ever, but his mouth was set and there was a tightness around his eyes that suggested he was not quite as calm as he appeared. His grip on his mare’s reins was so tight his knuckles were white. As Gereint watched, he loosened his hold on the reins and set one hand on the pommel of his saddle instead, seemingly for balance, or possibly support, for then he leaned forward and bowed his head over the mare’s neck as though suddenly gripped by weakness.

“Are you well?” Gereint asked tentatively.

Beguchren did not look up. “Of course.”

Gereint paused. Then he said tentatively, “I’m surprised to see them this far south. Or this far east.”

The mage straightened in his saddle, put his shoulders back, lifted his head, and said, “Yes.” His tone was perfectly neutral. He did not glance at Gereint, but stared straight down the road between the ears of his horse.

Gereint had thought he might ask again, given the sighting, whether the mage might tell him why they were going north. Perhaps seeing griffins would count as coming to the desert? But something in Beguchren’s blank neutrality made him hesitate, and the moment passed. He said instead, “It should be possible, as you suggested, to reach Pamnarichtan this morning and Metichteran sometime this afternoon.”

Beguchren took a breath. Then another. He managed a slight smile, giving Gereint a sideways look. “You don’t wish to go fishing?”

“No,” Gereint said slowly. “Or even if I had, not after seeing the griffins. Somehow this doesn’t seem like a morning for fishing.” He concentrated, in fact, on keeping his own tone as neutral as Beguchren’s. It wasn’t as easy as the mage made it seem.

Yet somehow Gereint felt, for the first time, truly easy about his decision to continue north, as though it was truly
his
decision, unconstrained by the mage’s subtle—and not-so-subtle—compulsion. But was it the griffin sighting that had made the difference? Or some indefinable alteration in the mage’s manner? Something else entirely?

But Beguchren said only, “Good,” turned his mare’s head to the north, and nudged her into a trot.

Gereint followed, wondering whether he was right to hear more than one meaning in that simple word. He tried not to look away into the woods beside the road or imagine that the occasional snap of a branch in the woods along the road revealed the approach of more brigands. He knew Beguchren had been right, that every decent traveler did have the duty to put down brigands if he could—but he did not want to see the king’s mage bring that frozen light glimmering out of earth and water a second time.

But the woods were quiet.

Gereint tried not to think about riding along this road in the other direction, with Sicheir and the rest, on the way to Breidechboden and freedom. That ride had been wound about with uncertainty and worries. Despite remembering all of them perfectly clearly, that journey seemed, in memory, one of the more pleasant interludes in his life, and Tehre’s house at the end of it a haven of peace.

What would Tehre be doing this morning? Breaking something, undoubtedly. Some small ordinary household object, or a catapult somebody had made for her—somebody else, and how foolish to be jealous of that unknown and hypothetical maker—or a wagon or carriage or who knew what. Maybe a model bridge. Maybe she’d persuaded the Arobern to let her have a large building to tear down. Gereint thought of the way Tehre had made Derich’s sword shatter upon striking the bronze swan and wished he could watch her bring down a building. What kind of minor stress might she use to make stone shear and shatter? It would be fascinating, he was sure. And impressive.

The road was very quiet. Only birds sang, not with the urgency of spring, but with a desultory chirp here and there. Other than the sluggish river to their right, only squirrels moved, running along the occasional branch or darting across the road. Probably the odd rustle back in the woods was a squirrel. Or a deer. Almost certainly none of the rustles signaled the presence of brigands or wolves or anything in the least alarming. Gereint wondered what Beguchren would do if a brigand in the woods tried to shoot them from hiding, then tried hard not to wonder about any such question. He did not really want to know.

For all his comments about pressing the pace, the mage had let his mare fall into a gentle walk. He rode with the reins loose and his head bowed. Maybe he, also, was concentrating on the sounds from the woods?

They rode into Pamnarichtan about four hours after leaving Raichboden. The horses, sensible creatures, pricked up their ears and tried determinedly to head for the hay and grain scents of the stable at the southernmost inn, which overlooked the confluence where the Nerintsan ran into the Teschanken.

Gereint reluctantly held his mare and the packhorse from leaving the road. He looked at Beguchren. “We don’t
have
to stop here you think it’s urgent to get on.”

“No, we’ll rest here. And get something to eat. If we don’t, I imagine we’ll wish we had long before we reach Metichteran.” Beguchren let his horse turn toward the stable.

Beguchren sounded as calm and unruffled as ever, but Gereint saw that the mage was holding the reins with one hand and bracing himself unobtrusively against the pommel of his saddle with his other, much as he had immediately after the griffins had passed. He watched him narrowly, surprised. Just how hard had it been on him to do what he had done to those brigands? But Beguchren had seemed all right afterward…

Gereint let his horse follow the mage’s mare, then nudged it into a slightly faster pace so he would reach the inn’s stableyard first. Swinging quickly down from his saddle, he came around into position to offer Beguchren a steadying hand and his bent knee as a stepping block.

Beguchren looked slightly taken aback, which for him was like an exclamation of surprise. For a moment he only looked down at Gereint. But he did not order him out of the way or make a point of dismounting without help. He merely said at last, “Thank you, Gereint,” and accepted the offered assistance.

Gereint kept his arm under Beguchren’s hand for a long moment, until he felt that the smaller man was steady on his feet. The inn’s stable boys came out to get the horses. Gereint told them, “Go ahead and untack them and rub them down. Give them some grain. My lord will be here an hour or more and he’ll want them rested.”

“Honored sir,” murmured the boys, with covert, fascinated glances that measured the difference in size between Gereint and Beguchren. But the white-haired man was so obviously a lord that they were respectful and quick and didn’t whisper to each other until they were out of sight.

“There’s a table in the shade,” Gereint said, nodding to it. It was also the closest table. “I’ll tell them to bring something to eat as well as tea, shall I?”

“Yes.” Beguchren lifted his hand deliberately from Gereint’s arm. “Thank you,” he repeated calmly, and walked quite steadily to the table. But he gripped both the edge of the table and the arm of the chair to brace himself before he sat down.

“Tea,” Gereint told the inn staff. He spoke briskly and casually, as though he had no doubt whatsoever that service would be instant and respectful—exactly the way an important lord’s retainer would speak. “With honey and milk. Wine, whatever you have that’s good. Sweet rolls—you have sweet rolls? Good. Sliced beef and eggs. Quickly, now, you understand?”

“Honored sir,” murmured the women, and vanished to see to it.

Gereint went back to the table and leaned against the shading oak, his arms crossed. He found he was frowning and tried to smooth out his expression.