Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
The two-horned female had turned tail at Arlin’s shouts and was now trying to make its exit through the hole, which was blocked by the snout of the third, trying to make its way in. They both screamed and grunted and the stallion screamed and Arlin screamed and I was running toward her on my bandy legs as fast as I ever have run.
I didn’t know to what purpose.
Now Arlin had turned tail and had no more breath for taunting the thing. I myself screamed, for her evasions were useless; the monster might have run down any horse born. There was only a yard between them when she darted behind a tree and it hit the trunk with its shoulder and I heard ripping roots. Again it bellowed and Arlin was at the wall, plastered back against the stakes, with her rapier twinkling so tiny in front of its blunt snout.
I had reached the side of the thing; so tall it rose I could almost have walked under its belly. I had my dowhee in my hands, but the hedger is not much of a piercing implement, and few swords of any kind might have reached through to the heart of the beast. I saw long, bristling hair, bare pink armpits, legs like those of a man with dropsy. I slashed at the pink, to distract it, and not waiting to see if I had succeeded, dashed in around the bulk of the foreleg and slashed twice under the throat, burying the dowhee completely in flesh.
The thing rose up, shrieking. I saw that none of its legs was on the ground and then I saw nothing, blinded and drowned by blood. It came down all of a piece and I knew I was about to be smashed under it, but I heard its snout hit the palisade before its body hit, and the long head held there, braced.
When the weight of the thing struck the ground I was bounced clean off it into the air, and my face struck the fur of the bloody cut throat before I came down again. It emitted its last breath like the bellows of an organ emptying, and the whole mass twitched, only once.
I was being dragged out from under, and I was content to lay passive and let the dragging continue. I heard Arlin scream at the red sight of me, high and wavering, the first altogether womanly sound I had ever heard from her mouth.
In retrospect I think that I had given up all hope she was still alive (though what else or who else was handling me I did not surmise), and the relief of her racket brought tears to wash the blood out of my eyes. I was both winded and numb and quite willing to lie there beside the bleeding beast, when I remembered there were two more, and it became suddenly easy to roll to my feet. “Where’s my dowhee?” I cried, my voice cracking. “Quick! What did I do with it?”
“It’s in your hand,” said Arlin phlegmily, and then she hugged the bloodsoaked package that was I.
It was some sort of swine, we decided by lamplight after dragging more thorn to plug the entrance hole (although it did not seem the sows had the same pugnacity as the boar). Two of its horns were actually tushes, and the third was pale and fibrous. We measured it at six feet at the shoulder, and approximately sixteen inches more in the middle of the back.
It was a very peculiar night, and it occupies a place set apart in my memory, like that spent with the ghostly family, and that of being dead myself.
We could not skin the entire brute, nor could we have carried it on the horse if we had done so, but we managed the skin of the head, with the ears and horn, and we knocked out both tushes with the back of an ax. We also took the sole of one foot, with its double hoof and two claws. We wrapped the whole mess in waxed cloth Arlin found in one of the abandoned cottages, then we heated water and spent a good hour washing. We purloined clothing here and there—for everything we had had been dyed in blood, including my precious piss-stained shirt—ate again, and finally lay down together in the stall next to the distraught mare.
I could not stop shaking, though Arlin seemed nothing more than pleasantly excited by recent events. She very kindly explained the difference by the fact that I had been overused this past week, but I opined instead that I was not the adventurous sort.
It is hard, now, to believe that I slept that night and harder to believe that having fallen asleep I woke at first light.
That morning I witnessed the best and the worst that comes with owning a horse like Arlin’s fine mare. Few beasts I have ever ridden or tended could have carried double, endured a night like it had, and then carried double at top speed the next day. Fewer would have had the energy still to spook and shy at everything and nothing in its path. It was spooking because
of the wax cloth package strapped with my dowhee over my shoulder. Arlin had abandoned all her other gear, as I had before, to lighten the load, but she had a suspicion the proof of the dragon was a card that might prove of value in the next hand. Or the one after.
Arlin held on to cards like that, even when the hand that dealt them was done.
We had not been under way for a half hour, had climbed east, and both seen and smelled the sea behind us when she asked me whether I really wanted to chase the king or go directly to the Earl of Daraln.
The question irritated me. “Three in one, Arlin; I’m after the king because I have no idea where Powl lives!”
“I do,” she said, glancing doubtfully over her shoulder. “I mean, I know where his manor lies, in the hills outside Sordaling. Or did you mean another… a hiding place?”
I think I started to sob. “No! I don’t know. I’ve never been there. Am I the only one in the civilized world who doesn’t know where my own teacher lives?”
Arlin only answered, “There is no civilized world,” and squeezed her horse faster.
We went very fast, over hills and running streams that caused the mare to dance; sometimes I think Arlin pushed straight through the woods without a path. Branches of swamp maple and willow scratched my face and must have done worse to Arlin. The mare’s breathing made the drum sound of horses that are working to capacity, but so springy she went it was as though she had no weight and we had no weight on her.
We came out of trees onto a road. “Now you know where we are, don’t you?” said Arlin, and I stared around me.
“No. Where are we?”
Again she gave me a distrustful glance. “We’re on Sankhill, just south of town. Of Sordaling.”
“So quick? This took me weeks on South Road.”
“South Road is a great loop, and you were walking and working and nosing about, weren’t you? Believe me, this is Sankhill.”
“I’ve never been here,” I admitted, and as we pressed along the road—a real road this time—self-pity made me add, “I’ve never had a horse, nor freedom to use my own feet. I’ve been in walls all my life, Arlin, until my teacher left me last autumn. I’ve only been places for the past six months!”
“Just like a monk,” she said over the mare’s smooth gallop.
“Exactly a monk,” I snapped back. “The level of my worldly ignorance cannot easily be overestimated.” Nor that of the damage that ignorance could do, I added silently.
Arlin refused to be drawn into bickering. “Well, we’re less than an hour from Daraln House. If the horse holds up.”
I almost fell off. “Less than… then maybe the king has gotten to him already!”
“I doubt it.” She shook her head with confidence. “He’s encumbered. He is not Sordaling bred, and he has not a horse like Sabea under him.”
After a quarter mile we turned again, and I thought perhaps I had seen this comer, with its collection of cottages and its courier office. “Without the horse, of course, we’d have no hope.”
This seemed such an unnecessary thing to announce that I asked what was in her mind to say it.
“I thought perhaps… that you might be angry with me for my behavior last night. Flinging myself in front of the great boar like that. Making you come after.”
“You didn’t make me come after. It didn’t occur to me to be angry.” The horse rocked us a few more paces and I added, “Besides, I hadn’t time.”
Now I knew where we were. I had been along this stretch many times. By God, I had been here with Powl, going to the Sordaling Library. To our left was my very own hill, with the ugly square building somewhere atop it, where Powl had found the astronomer swinging in suicide. Where I had seen Powl swinging by one hand from a string, his bright shoe buckles twinkling, a bright button twinkling in his hand.
“It’s been six months you’ve been gone?”
“More like eight.” I answered.
“And now you’re coming back to your walls. Your teacher. To die with him?”
“That’s not what I intend,” I answered shortly, but it was only a half truth; my intentions were blank. Arlin gave a big sigh, like one of the mare’s breaths, and again pulled us left off the road and into the trees.
This was Velonya proper, at last: wet muck and standing water, pulling the mare’s feet with every stride and covering us with spatters. We could not outrun the mosquitoes.
We came upon a man in the uniform of the local militia (born and bred enemies of the Sordaling students) and splashed by him. He shouted and flashed a pike, but neither threw it nor left his position in the wet brush to chase us.
“Daraln seems to be surrounded by the poppuls,” whispered Arlin. “The redhead must have sent a courier ahead. You may find… he may be…”
I said nothing.
The mare took a low fence and we erupted out of the woods onto a sunny lawn, scattering sheep. The house before me—close before me—was rectangular and modern, of red brick. It was not large for an earl’s dwelling, even for one of his lesser dwellings. Its garden of perhaps ten acres was fronted by a tall hedge with an intricately worked gate. Arlin took us from the back around the side and to the front door of the neat, symmetrical house. The mare had to be spun in a circle three times, as though she had forgotten how to stop.
I staggered over the grass and through a rose border just coming into bud. As I swayed on the threshold of the double, paneled door (edged by glass surmounted by a fan of glass), the wax cloth burden on its rope slid down the front of me and broke open.
I tried to call out and could not. I raised my hand to pound and the door opened and there was Powl looking at me inquiringly with a very calm face.
“Nazhuret,” he said, and the sound of his voice was a dream and a wound to me. “You don’t look very good.” Then his eyes slid down to the bloody package unrolling at his feet.
“What’s this you brought me?” He leaned over and with one manicured nail prodded the monster’s horn.
He was dressed in sedate dark blue, with silver piping, and he had a waistcoat of subdued brocade. I noted—or my little observer noted—that I had been right about my teacher. Given idleness, he tended to become plump. But his head was the same: bald back to the center, smooth, and his face and expression and movement smooth.
“Powl, I’ve betrayed you. Through my stupidity I’ve betrayed you, and the king has had a fit of rage and you are condemned.”
He pulled at the fibrous horn, lifting the skin around it, and he whistled. “This is indeed something different, and you did very well to bring it to me.”
“Powl!” I shouted, and my voice cracked. “You must run! He is on his way now!”
Fowl stood up again and looked for something with which to wipe his hands. He settled on my shirt. “Nazhuret, you bring me no news. And no, you didn’t betray me. I never told you to keep your training a secret.”
He stood in the doorway but did not invite me in. “But you told me to avoid officialdom. Especially the court. I didn’t know why then, but—”
“And you don’t know why now.” He had almost raised his voice. “I gave you good advice, but not for the purpose of hiding me from the king. I do not hide from the king.” Powl took one step forward in his mirror-finished shoes. “Because,” he said, “it may interest you to know that I am not and never have been a traitor to the crown.”
My emotion broke free then. “But the crown’s certainly a traitor to you, Powl Inpres, Earl of Daraln, Viscount Korres!” I threw the titles at him like insults, because he had never given them to me. “Either you run from him now or you’re a dead man. And me beside you.
“We can break the surround easily—hell, they’re only poppuls. You and I can do it easily, and in the forest nothing but hounds can find us, and I think in the past year I have even learned to handle hounds.”
“No.” He shut me up with one word. As always, “Nazhuret, no and no. I am not a dead man, and I forbid you to waste my effort in you by getting yourself killed.”
I stepped closer. “Too bad. You can’t forbid me things anymore. You finished with me, remember. You said leave the key.”
His expression changed, but still I could not read it. “And you resent that, Nazhuret? You do. But I think it was necessary; you needed… other teachers. Tell me this: Is King Rudof after your blood, too?”
My laugh was ugly, and I stared at the messy burden at my feet. “He has refused to let anyone touch me. He has treated me with indulgence, lenience, privilege—I’ve never heard of the like! It has driven me mad!”
When I raised my eyes again to Powl, his were wide, blazing. In his face was a sort of intent awe. He began to nod.
It was as though my teacher had discovered a new planet in the skies, “He has? Has he!”
He paced the length of the entry stoop and glanced up again. “And who is this with you, Nazhuret?” His gaze, politely inquisitive, rested on Arlin, who was glaring at him and walking her mare.