The Birthgrave (43 page)

Most of the house doors were locked tight and bolted from within. Many had fled, I think, at the last instant into the cellars and passages beneath their houses. Nearer the wall a whole street had been gutted by fire, still smoking, and a thick scattering of dead men lay there, some of whom I recognized; the last soldiers of Vazkor's army.

Finally, a white stone house with a courtyard, the door of which was swinging on broken hinges. We went inside, and Mazlek dragged furniture from inner rooms to block the entrance. He would not let me help him. Once the barricade was in place, we went in and upstairs, and found narrow empty bedchambers. He made me lie on a bed, and pulled the covers over me.

“I will be outside your door,” he said, “if there's trouble of any kind.”

“But, Mazlek,” I said, “how long do we stay here?”

“Not long. We must leave the city as soon as possible.”

“And then? Where?”

“White Desert,” he said.

I lay in the room but did not sleep, though I was very tired. Once there was a great commotion in the street, shouts and screams and crashes, but I was too exhausted to get up and look, and eventually the sounds died away. I spent a considerable amount of time reflecting, quite irrelevantly, on the fact that there seemed to be no hovels in the lower quarter. A City of palaces and houses, as I supposed Ezlann had been, as I supposed were all the Cities of the south—too proud to degenerate into slums, these bastard children of the Lost.

The colorless sky crept toward darkness.

Mazlek came in softly.

“I must leave you for a while, goddess,” he said. “Don't move from this place, and light no lamps.”

I nodded, and he went. The night pressed close, very black, except that outside many separate little firelights sprang up, and flickered rose-red on the ceiling of the narrow room. The house began to creak and squeak ominously in the way of all houses when they have a solitary victim in them. I heard countless steps on the stairs, heavy, sly, cruel steps, soldiers with knives, whose way with pregnant women was too well-known to me from camp chat to leave me unmoved. But none of them were real, except the last. I sat up when I heard them, tense and very still, knowing this was no trick of the house. The door to the room swung open and a soldier of Anash stood there, the fire-glow picking out his livery, the bear mask, the stained knife stuck through his belt.

“Goddess,” said the soldier of Anash in Mazlek's voice, “don't be alarmed. I found this one on his own, and got these from him. It will be easy now. Most of them are drunk—drinking openly in the streets like animals. The gates will have sentries, no doubt, but as incapable as the rest, I think. There's a horse in the courtyard.”

I followed him out of the house, and he mounted me behind him on a shaggy pack horse, a sturdy, squat, dark little beast, with more than a share of donkey; there was a glass wine bottle tied on the saddle. Mazlek unstoppered it, and poured half the red liquid onto the paving.

“When I tell you, goddess, you must act like a drunken woman, cling to me and laugh.” He sounded acutely embarrassed, and added: “Forgive me. I would not ask it of you if there were another way.”

“Oh. Mazlek,” I said reproachfully, “do you think me such a fool? Forget I am what you think I am because you killed me with your sword at the steading by the Water, and I healed, and followed you. If we are to make this journey together, you must understand I am nothing very special or particularly worth any trouble on your part. I will do what you tell me, and be grateful for your help.” It was a moment of weary truth for me, very bitter, yet oddly comforting too. If he was shocked by what I had said, he did not show it There was a moment's silence, and then he spurred the horse and we were off.

The ride was swift, punctuated by dark alleys, by abstract patterns of firelight and figures outlined on that redness. Drunken men shouted at us, but had no particular inclination to follow. Away in the heart of the city there was a fierce orange glare among the palaces, and gouts of purple smoke. So much then for sisterly love restored. We reached a broad avenue and ahead, quite suddenly, the wall loomed behind houses. A lower gate this, not of great importance, therefore presumably sparsely manned. We passed a crowded bonfire in the street, and a missile struck the horse, which swerved, corrected itself, and ran on. Around a block of plundered shops, and stables where a few stray animals wandered, and the gate lay ahead.

“Now,” Mazlek said.

Even expecting his change of character, it was a surprise to me. He jerked on the horse's reins abruptly, so that it protested and pranced, and he began to sway in the saddle, yelling some formless song without words or melody. He had untied the half-empty wine bottle, and now waved it aloft. I was so enthralled with his performance I almost forgot my own, but finally remembered, put my arms around him, and began to sing at the top of my voice one of the musical offerings of Darak's camp, which might raise a few eyebrows, even here.

In this way we got to the gate-mouth, an entrance for drovers probably, judging from width and ugliness, and the amount of ancient animal droppings cemented to the road.

There were about ten men, more than I had hoped for, but unmasked, and with their store of bottles and wineskins about them, they were obviously not in their prime. I thought there might be some business with passwords which we did not know, but they had apparently forgotten all that.

“Halt!” The nearest one, who seemed to be in charge, came wavering toward us. “Halt, you drink-sodden son of a mare. Halt, halt, halt. What's that up behind you?”

He did not speak in the elegant manner of the Cities, though in a corruption of the same tongue—a kind of army slang, almost a language on its own.

“A woman,” Mazlek said, and offered him the glass bottle.

The soldier drank, belched, and looked at me.

“Belhannese,” he said.

“That's right,” Mazlek said, “and very willing to make me forget it.”

“Not much showing,” the soldier said, “but I'd say she'd got one in the pot.”

“That's all right by me. She won't be saying it's mine, then, if we come here again, will she?”

The soldier put up a hand and began to explore me, and I felt Mazlek's body stiffen. I gave him a little slap.

“Did I say you owned me, soldier?” I asked Mazlek. “Just because you gave me a ride? This is a nice man, I can tell.” I patted my besieger's cheek, and the fool grinned. “We were going outside for a bit. Why not come with us?”

“Outside?” he queried, dubious. “Why not here and now?”

“I like to pick and choose,” I said, “and besides, do you want that riffraff pushing in before you?”

He glanced at the other men, grinned again, and walked to the front of the horse. As he led us out of the gate there were a few shouts, but he told them to be quiet, and they were, so that was no problem.

A little path ran down from the gate. The platform had degenerated into a slope here, loosely mantled with spring-pared trees.

“Here'll do,” our escort said.

“Never mind him,” I said as I got down from the horse, nodding at Mazlek. I let the soldier pull me into some bushes, where he proceeded to get on with what interested him most. Mazlek was perhaps too quick, too angry, but the trained fighter in him saved us; he was also too professional to make a mess of things, for all his fury. He rose suddenly over us, palmed the man's mouth, and thrust the knife into him. The Anashian died without a sound, and Mazlek dragged him off me, and flung him aside.

I could not see Mazlek's expression behind the mask, but every line of his body expressed his horror.

“Goddess—I thought I had been too quick for him to—”

“Unimportant,” I said.

He shook his head and turned away.

We remounted the horse, and rode quickly from the walls of Belhannor, through village fields, into the safe darkness.

* * *

We were lucky. An hour or so later, riding in the scrub woodland trailing from the foot of the hill, we found another horse, twin to the first, easily caught with a gift of sweet-grass. Mounted separately, we rode down at a trot, and made the dawn without a halt.

Belhannor was only a shape on the horizon now, an ivory figure from the game of Castles, with a smoke plume like a thundercloud still poised above her head. We made our stop in a copse of twisted thorn trees, and lit a small fire. Mazlek stripped off the things of Anash, and put on once more the soft iron-colored tunic and mask of a lower citizen. Now we were only Belhannese refugees, one pair out of hundreds probably, making for ruined Orash perhaps, until it was safe to go home.

Mazlek drew from the saddle pack a small box, and I could see from his unease what it must contain.

“Mazlek,” I said softly, “I can go for many days without food. You supply yourself as you want.”

He nodded, but slunk off among the trees to eat. He had not flinched at the bald statement, but, even so, the taboos of a lifetime could not be blown away so swiftly, if ever.

Later, we rode on, keeping a steady but unhurried speed. The land around me seemed quite unfamiliar—I had seen it last under snow, and through a fever haze. Nevertheless, it was a strange journey, this going backward over ground I had crossed before—the first time ever I had returned to any place which it took longer than a day to reach. Beneath the horses' hooves the soil was now warmly brown, dappled with many greens. Dusk fell more slowly, and birds rang like bells at the dawn light. A fox's lair among the bracken, and a vixen mottled white on her russet, still half in her winter coat.

Five or six days passed, and Mazlek told me we were not making toward Orash, as I had thought, but would turn eastward now toward the hill line. Beyond the hills—mountains, part of the great chain of primeval children folded upward from the southern earth in the first struggles of the landscape. Northward, they would become one with the Ring, broken only by the blue water, Aluthmis. Northeast they would lose their peaks in the rock plains that fell away from Eshkorek Arnor, City of White Desert.

“The best road for us to take,” Mazlek said. “If any followed us, seeking you, they'd guess we would go by the open path—back the way the armies came.”

“Road?”
I said. “Are there roads across the mountains?”

It seemed there were, though ancient and elusive, impassable in winter, tracks of an old mountain people who had vanished like the Lost, centuries before. Mazlek seemed confident enough, but a sense of foreboding settled on me. It was not the road I feared, but the destination—Eshkorek Arnor. I did not know why. I reasoned with myself that it was the Javhovor of Eshkorek who haunted me—that anxious tortoise who had thrust his neck from his shell too far by half. The brave, terrified man who had screeched at me across the Council table in Za then died in the square with a piece of tile in his brain—Vazkor's example of power. Yet no need to fear, there was a new lord now—Vazkor's man.

* * *

The eleventh day of our journey, we rode into the hills, and left that valley of failure behind. There was a village or two, where Mazlek would walk off with the black-eyed chief, and return with small bundles of food. I ate a little every seventh or eighth day, and my pampered stomach rebelled each time with hideous pains. The worst trouble was a constant tiredness. Several times I fell asleep as I rode, and miraculously kept my seat until some jolt would wake me up again. Each night, a six-hour halt. We kept no stated watch, though Mazlek slept little, I think. As watcher I was quite useless, and could not keep my eyes open. It angered me, but I was helpless; the thing in me made me so.

But there seemed to be no pursuit. Probably the runaway bitch-witch-whore-goddess had no great interest for them. They had not bothered even to pursue Vazkor, it seemed, simply accepted the word that he was dead. Fools. Where he was, what he did, were problematical, but I knew at least he could not die, my brother, with his healing skin.

Beyond the hills, the mountains rose, clustered, uncut amethyst, dully luminous against the soft spring skies.

I became aware that I was searching, asleep and awake, my brain burrowing into itself to remember something. Curious, the sensation of quest, without a known goal.

9

And they were kind to us, after all, the mountains.

The horses, with their sure, shaggy, little feet, managed well, and enjoyed the tufts of ice-green mountain grass which cracked the stone. Fresh streams and waterfalls sprinkled themselves into shallow pools. Heather, every shade of purple, furred the old sleeping bones.

There were, at first, winding tracks, safe enough, but crudely hewn. But then we found the road—a pass, wide and paved, not as the slaves of the Lost had paved the roads of the Plains, but in small, palm-sized blocks. Mostly the mountain sides walled us on this way, but here and there a ghastly drop would open to left or right, jagged frozen cascades of rock, plunging into barren valleys. Less beauty now. The farther we rode, the more desolate the road became. Soon the greens and heathers were all gone. We had paid for our safe passage with ugliness.

Toward evening, perhaps five days into the mountains, we passed a ramshackle little hut about twenty feet from the road. A half-barren field stretched sloping toward us, and three or four despairing trees leaned on each other for support near the door. There were two old men in the field, both skin and bone got up in rags, with long light hair flapping in the breeze. Not of the Dark People, these two, but outcast city dwellers presumably. One crouched on his haunches staring at us, unmasked, the other stood up stiff and straight, his back turned. After a moment I saw that there was a flock of gray mountain pigeons in the field, pecking at the impoverished crops. Every so often a group of these would fly onto the standing man's head and shoulders, and stamp up and down, or settle to preen.