The Well of Darkness (14 page)

Another compulsion. I
‘
m damned if she can just do this to me whenever she feels like it
, I thought furiously.

Grimly, I fought back.

Tarani gasped, moved restlessly, then pulled her mother into her arms. “We must go now, Mother,” she said, looking straight at me, her eyes shining in the lamp light. “We’ll be back. Care for yourself well.”

Zefra turned to me, and the compulsion clamped down. I stood there, outwardly immobile, seething inside, while Zefra stared at me.

“What I have said of you, Rikardon—I am Tarani’s mother. If you both return here safely, I will offer my apology, and you will share the love I bear my daughter.” Her voice thickened, and she drew herself up—at that moment, she was every inch a ruler, not a prisoner. “If anything happens to Tarani, however …”

“Nothing will happen, Mother,” Tarani interrupted the threat. “We will both return, soon.” She hugged her mother once more; I felt myself bow stiffly.

Tarani snatched up a few things that waited on the ledge at one side of the room: a water pouch, a baldric with sword and dagger, and a second pouch that jingled with coins. She slipped on the baldric hurriedly, then took my hand and led me to the hallway door, paused to open it slowly, and marched us out between the two guards.

We retraced our steps, a little less smoothly than before. I was fighting the compulsion, staggering, forcing Tarani to drag me along physically. There was a bitter satisfaction in the way she gasped for breath and pulled at our linked hands in uneven spurts of energy, but the contest was nonphysical. It wasn’t even mental, except as the mind is supposed to be able to control the will. It was a conflict of desire, so strong that it took on some of the character of muscles flexing and opposing. It seemed to me that the purpose of the struggle had shifted. It wasn’t that I wanted to voice my objections and she wanted me silent. It was much more basic than that. She wanted to control me, and I wanted to prove she couldn’t.

When we approached the city gate, I stopped struggling. Tarani stopped pulling and we rested for a minute, while she quieted her own heavy panting. Such sounds might give us away to the guards when we got nearer. I could see Tarani’s face clearly in the silvery moonlight, and she was looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and consternation.

What do you think?
I asked her silently.
That I
‘
d let this quarrel interfere with our escape? We may have different reasons but right now I want the same thing you do
—
to get the hell out of Lord City, Eddarta, and this part of the world.
The pressure of the compulsion lessened, but I could feel it poised, ready to clamp down again.

Tarani, if you have any skill at thought reading at all, hear this
, I pleaded, not quite sure that she couldn‘t hear me.
Take away the compulsion. Show me that you have some trust left for me. Take it all away. Let
‘
s walk out of here side by side, partners again.

The compulsion made itself felt again—tight, compelling. She turned toward the gate and took my hand, and
Tarani walked me out of Lord City.

She held the compulsion until we were halfway down the ramped road to the larger city.

It was still nearly two hours before dawn, and the road was utterly deserted, the stones of its pavement glistening and slick from condensation. This road and the river branch that followed it closely on the west linked the two parts of Eddarta. The other side of the road—as well as the hillside on the opposite side of the river—was kept free of tall growth so that the Lord City guards could have clear view in every direction downslope from the walls of the city. The slopes weren’t cultivated, but the nearness of so much water supported a lush carpet of ground cover that was sort of like the grass Ricardo had known, but taller, multiple-bladed, with fatter stalks.

It was onto this spongy, sweet-smelling carpet that Tarani and I tumbled, the moment she released her compulsion. I caught her off guard, jerked at her arm, and we rolled down the bank of the built-up roadbed into one of the hollows of an uneven slope.

It wsa a gesture of defiance and, I suppose, of revenge.

I was mad at
her
for not trusting me.

I was mad at
myself
for having lost her trust.

I was mad at
her
for letting Zefra twist her.

I was mad at
myself
for getting us recaptured and exposing her to Zefra’s influence. I wasn’t angry. I was
mad
, and determined to get some things straightened out, right then. Even though there was no one in sight, I felt exposed, standing on the moon-glittered stones of the road. So I pulled her off the road, not particularly gently, but with only the conscious goal of getting us to a place that felt more private.

The bank was steeper than it had seemed, and we rolled together as we fell. The muscles of her arm and back moved under my hands; her legs tangled with mine; her breasts cushioned my weight as I rolled over her. Clear and sharp as a whip snapping, I felt a different need unleashed in me, absorbing and overwhelming the fury that had started our fall. When we came to a halt, I sprawled full length on top of her, pressed my mouth against hers, and fumbled urgently with the hem of her tunic, groping for the tie that fastened her trousers.

I couldn’t have imagined it. She was responding, arching against me, speaking wordlessly deep in her throat, her hands pressing thrills to my neck and back.

The whip snapped again, and she was fighting me. Her hands pushed against my shoulders. A leg that had caressed mine came between our bodies and braced against my hip. I pulled at it, dislodged it, pressed against her. Her forearm slammed the side of my head, sending a blinding flash of pain to my cheek and jaw—and she was free. She scrambled away and crouched, watching me, waiting for the next attack.

It was that posture that brought me to my senses. It wasn’t the stance of a woman terrified of a rapist. There was nothing of desperation, even of fear, in the way she looked at me. She was a fighter defying her enemy, challenging him, eagerly awaiting the next encounter.

And I was the enemy.

The fury and the need drained out of me, leaving me weak. I took a deep breath and rubbed my face, ignoring the way my hands trembled. The skin on the left side of my face tingled, and my jaw felt tender.

I let myself drop to the ground. Tarani moved slightly to keep me directly in front of her, not relaxing her guard.
Come on
, I thought.
I wouldn’t blame you if you flayed me alive.
I was empty of words. I couldn’t explain what had happened, even to myself. How could I hope to ask her forgiveness?

So I sat silently, waiting for her to decide what to do, ready for whatever action she wanted to take.

She laughed.

It was the first coherent sound either one of us had made, and it wasn’t the lovely sound I remembered. It was harsh, triumphant, shocking in the silent night. So shocking, in fact, that it even surprised her. It broke off abruptly and she looked around, as if wondering where the sound had come from. Her gaze rested on me, and she seemed to melt down into a little ball, huddled against the opposite slope of the small hollow.

It seemed like hours that we sat there, struggling—I, at least—to comprehend what had happened. Yet my inner awareness told me it was only a few minutes later that Tarani stirred. I sat up, too, and braced myself. I was ready for what she would say—I had lived it over and over again in those few minutes.

Tarani had approached me gently in the desert and I had refused her. By what right had I now tried to claim her by force? She
had
responded; of that I was sure. To my already guilty mind, that only made it worse. I was afraid that I had brutalized—and destroyed—her feelings for me.

I didn’t say any of that; I expected her to say it. But she only stood up, stared at me for the briefest instant, dropped her gaze, and started the climb back to the road. I followed her and we walked, side by side but not touching, into larger Eddarta.

The city was wakening, getting ready for the day, but as yet there were few people moving about the streets, and soft echoes of our footfalls ghosted behind us. The city was built mostly of stone, reed, and brick, and it was old—older than any place Ricardo had seen in his own world. It showed its age in the patched roofs, where newly cut reed tops were dark splotches against the aged, bleached thatching. Nearly all the structures in larger Eddarta were two stories high; carefully fitted baked-clay bricks were strengthened with a mortar of dried mud. That, too, spoke in its multishaded patterns of years and years of repair.

In this pre-dawn quiet, the city seemed huge and empty. At midday, the streets teemed with crowds of people. Traders, searching out bargains. Lords, looking for particular objects or merely out slumming. Most of all, Eddartans, looking to purchase those things they couldn’t produce themselves—butchers out to buy bread, a baker looking for a new suit, weavers in search of jewelry.

Eddarta shrank under the force of those crowds, but never gave Rikardon the claustrophobic feeling Ricardo had experienced in some of the older European cities he had visited. This city might be old, but it was still quite modern. In Gandalara, there was no iron-based technology to create a need for newness.
Old
and
obsolete
were not the equivalent terms in Gandalara that they sometimes were in the world Ricardo had known.

The streets of Eddarta, built for the foot passage of people, still served their purpose very well. Those areas of the city which permitted vleks and carts had been built with wider streets to accommodate the different sort of traffic, and those streets were still wide enough. It might be that the carts were better made now, but that was the only change in “modern” Eddarta.

It was down one of those wider streets that Tarani led me. When we stopped in front of a door, I asked: “Is this Carn’s shop?”

She nodded, not looking at me, and tapped lightly on the door, once, and then twice more.

Carn was the name of a man friendly to the Fa’aldu, part of the group which helped slaves escape. On our way to Eddarta the first time, Vasklar at Stomested had given us Carn’s name as someone to go to if we needed help.

The door opened into darkness and we slipped through it.

“Speak ye the word,” growled a bass voice to our left. The windows were tightly covered with louvered shutters. As my eyes adjusted to the interior darkness, I could make out a slim shadow against one of the dimly glowing rectangles.

“To drink in the desert,” I said, remembering the amusement with which I had heard Vasklar’s solemn pronouncement of the “password”. Having seen the mines, and having learned what escaping slaves risked if recaptured, I was no longer amused.

“That be an old word, my friends,” the man said. “Name the one that gave it you.”

“Vasklar,” Tarani said. As the light grew with the outside dawn, details became clearer—like the dagger in the man’s hand, turning restlessly from a thin black line to a triangular shadow. At the sound of our friend’s name, he lowered the dagger and took a step backward.

“Aye, he said two might come. Another word, for surety—a name.”

“A name?” Tarani said, confused—but I thought I knew what the man meant.

“Thymas,” I said. “He was with us at Stomestad.”

The dagger’s shadow disappeared, and a strong-fingered hand closed on my arm. “A light not be safe as yet. What need ye? Have ye fed?”

“Sleep,” Tarani murmured, and I thought of all she had gone through in the past few hours. Strangely, there was no anger associated with the thought of the compulsion she had held for so long, only awareness that it had required a great deal of energy to handle compulsion and illusion at the same time. Then the struggle—

My mind sheered away from thinking about that.

“We need a safe place to sleep,” I said. “Then food, if you can spare it. Then—”

“It be enough for now,” he stopped me. “Will ye be sought this day?”

“Aye,” I said. “It be likely.”

His dialect is easy to pick up
, I thought,
even though this is the first time I
‘
ve heard it. Come to think of it, the Gandaresh I
‘
ve been exposed to is strikingly homogeneous. The Lords have a slightly more formal style, but for the most part, Gandalarans from both sides of the world speak nearly the same language. His syntax is different, as well as the inflection
—
I hope I
‘
ll have time to ask him about it.

Carn went to the window, pulled a brace bar, and opened the shutter a crack. A bar of lighter gray spilled into the room, and by that slight illumination, Carn gestured to me for help. For the first time, I could see that this was not so much a room as a storehouse. Goods of different kinds were stacked against the interior walls, packed for travel in bone-handled nets. I saw cloth, and art pieces, and—a long bundle, wrapped in heavy cloth—the gleaming tip of a bronze sword.

A prism-shaped stack of rolled carpet stood away from the walls, in the center of the room. Carn had me lift one end of the top roll, exposing a hollow area protected by an inverted V of tied reeds. Then he started pulling away false ends, short rolls of carpet identical to matching rolls on the other side. In the few minutes we worked, the sliver of gray light had brightened until the entire room was visible. When I looked inside the tent of carpet we had opened, I could see a yawning blackness in the floor.

“‘Tis not a large place,” Carn said, breathing heavily, “but it be room enough for a day’s rest. Use the lamp wisely; I’ll stamp three times when it’s time for ye to come out again. The end of this day, at least.”

I brought Tarani from where she rested on a heap of fabric. In the new day’s light, her weariness showed in the shadows under her eyes and the waxiness of her normally pale skin. Carn looked at her and caught his breath. I thought he might question us, but he merely said: “Aye, Lords will seek such a one.”