Thendara House (70 page)

My little brother. He must now be sixteen or eighteen, I have lost track… I cannot remember ever looking upon his face. He has neither mother, father, nor sister; truly he is orphaned. What was it Rohana said about him? That he was sworn paxman to Valdir Alton. But if I live I must go to my brother and get his forgiveness too
… and for the first time she remembered words Rohana had spoken on that same journey, words barricaded by her own terrible fear.

Will you not try and comfort your baby brother? You had your mother for eleven whole years. He has no one
. I could have helped him. I could have been at least a sister to him, if not a mother. I have failed at every human relationship in my life, and now I have killed Peter. It would have been enough to leave him. And now it is too late. Too late for everything.

The sky was filled now with billowing clouds which seemed to move on their own, independent of any wind.

This way, Jaelle. When the rain comes there will be flood down there. Keep your horse climbing
. Once again she turned to look at Magda and found her friend was not there. She was hallucinating again. She had failed with Magda too, if she had actually led Magda out to follow her here, into the wild trackless range country, where she would die.

Then she saw them.

She heard their hooves before she saw the riders, sweeping down toward her.
A Legion of mounted men, rank after rank, riding at full gallop, and over them flew Comyn banners, rippling in the rainbow wind. The colors of their robes were whirling around their horses’ flanks, and they raced across the sky, their hooves pounding on the cloud as if it were the canyon floor. She could hear the pounding, the thunder of a million hooves, digging into the whirling air and sending little sprays of cloud up like dust. Then the Aillard banner stretched across the sky, and now she could see the young woman who rode beneath it
.

She was tall and red-haired, magnificent, clad in blue with golden hair like a bell of the kireseth itself, like the painting of Cassilda in the ancient chapel. Yet somehow through and over the blue shimmered the crimson robes of a Keeper. My child, my daughter, did I bear you for this? So terribly young, so perfect in her virgin austerity. And behind her pounded the men of the Comyn, led by another leronis in crimson, men and women in Tower robes of green and blue and crimson and white, racing on to drive her down, flashing knives pursuing her, driving her up the canyon, the man who rode at her side went down beneath their hooves, she saw his head explode in blood which splashed her robe… She could see the horses now, hear the pounding of their hooves and smell their rank sweat, but she sat frozen, unable to take her eyes from the face of the young girl…

Pain jarred through her; a cloud of dust - real dust - suddenly choked her and the world came back into focus; from nowhere a rider, kerchief tied across the face, lean and swift, swooped out on the trail, grabbed her elbow, pulled at her horse.

“Quick! This way! Jaelle! Jaelle, wake up,
hurry
! Can’t you
see
… ” insanely, it was Magda’s voice. This was another hallucination, surely, but Magda sounded angry, she had better go with her to keep her happy. Jaelle dug her heels into the pony’s flank, pushed on upward on the trail. The thunder of hoofs was still there, but the riders in the sky were gone; the noise was below her, and her horse was scrambling for footing on the steep trail at the side of the gorge. But as Jaelle tried to speak, to protest this madness, the thunder and sound overwhelmed them. Chervines. Thousands of them, stampeding down the canyon floor, pounding, flying, a sea of cattle driven by the narrowing ravine into an impassible flood of horns, jammed bodies, hooves, right where she had been sitting her pony in the center of the trail!

The stampede poured past, on and on. Jaelle was shaking.
I could have been killed, I would have sat there drugged by the
kireseth
vision and let them ride right over me… And Madga. Magda. She is really here and once again she has saved my life
.

The last of the herd roared past, bleating and shoving. A last straggler bawled. A few of the beasts, driven and pushed to the edges, plunged off the trail and out of sight. Then they were gone, though the noise of their passing still shook the ground. And as the sound dulled to a distant thunder, the rain began, pouring as if the heavens had opened and dumped buckets on them.

Magda put out a hand in the sudden downpour. She said, “Up this way. I saw a cave.”

The light was already going as they climbed, and by the time they reached it, it was only a darkness against the cliffside, and Jaelle slid, still shaking, from her pony, and led it in. Magda followed her. She said, in a high terrified voice, “I saw you - and you were just
sitting
there - and the chervines coming down the canyon like the wind…”

“What made them - stampede like that?” Jaelle heard herself say. “The
kireseth
… ?”

“Was that what it was? I didn’t know. But there is floodwater above, pouring down into the ravine,” Magda said, and put her head out. “Look.”

Down where they had been riding, a wall of water was sweeping down the canyon, almost a river. Would the chervines be drowned or would they make it to higher ground? Magda thrust her head out till Jaelle was frightened as she hung over the canyon wall from the mouth of the cave, then pulled back inside.

“The high-water mark is a good four feet below us,” she said. “We’ll be safe here.” She pulled her saddle and saddlebags off the horse. “Well,
breda
, it’s better than the pass of Scaravel. At least I doubt if we’ll meet any banshees here.”

Jaelle’s legs would hardly hold her upright. She stood holding on to her horse, unable to move. Magda turned to say sharply, “Better get your saddle off and get into dry clothes if you have any. And have you anything to light a fire? There’s plenty of dry wood stacked back there - and look at the fire-ring; this place must be a regular place of resort for herd-men.”

But still Jaelle’s legs would not move, and finally Magda came and pushed her down on her spread cloak. “Lie down, then. Keep out of my way while I build a fire.”

I am shirking again. I have failed my duty. Even Magda, even Magda I have led into my failures. My mother died for me. I failed Rohana when she would have given me my heritage of
laran.
I failed my brother. And my oath-sisters. And my baby. And Peter
…

Magda had spread a blanket across the entrance for a windbreak, and was kneeling by the ring of stones, kindling a fire. Her dark hair was soaked, clinging in little wisps to her face. She had stripped off her soaked shirt and undertunic. Jaelle coughed on the smoke as the fire caught and began to blaze upward. A rough chimney had been guided through a hole in the roof of the cave. Soon Magda had a small pot rigged and was brewing bark-tea. She brought a small clay cup of the stuff to Jaelle and held it to her lips. Jaelle tasted it; it was sickeningly sweet and she shoved it away. Magda pushed it against her mouth and said sharply, “Drink it. You’re in shock and sugar is the best thing for that.”

Obediently Jaelle swallowed, and felt her head clear a little. She said after a minute, “You’ve saved my life again. How did you happen to turn up just in time?”

“I’ve only been trailing you for two days,” Magda said grimly. “What
possessed
you to take off like that - alone, pregnant, a storm coming up? You must have been crazy.”

“That’s what Peter said,” Jaelle whispered. “He threatened to have me drugged. Chained - “

“Peter would never do that,” Magda said incredulously. “Do you think he is a Dry-towner?” Then she caught the picture in Jaelle’s mind, restraints, perhaps tied to a bed in the Hospital floor - she knelt at Jaelle’s side and caught the woman in her arms.

“Oh, love, they wouldn’t have hurt you - truly they wouldn’t - ” she whispered. “I can see how afraid you were - but they wouldn’t have hurt you, and Cholayna, or I could have told them you were not crazy - “

“I killed him,” Jaelle whispered, her voice only a thread of horror. “I killed Peter. I left him lying dead in the HQ, on the floor of our bedroom!”

“I don’t believe you,” Magda said flatly. “I think you are delirious and don’t know what you did, or didn’t do. For now, get out of those wet clothes. We can’t keep a fire in here all night - we have to save the dry wood in case it snows, everything outside here is wet.” But Jaelle sat dazed and in the end Magda had to undress her like a child and wrap her in a blanket from her pack. With the embers of the fire Magda toasted some dry meat over the coals, and tried to persuade Jaelle to eat a little, but Jaelle, though she tried, could neither chew nor swallow.

Magda got into dry underwear and a dry tunic, hanging her breeches near the coals of the fire.

“I was terrified,” she said at last. “You must have been completely out of it - you were sitting in the middle of the trail with all those chervines stampeding down the canyon and the flood-water up ahead. And I kept seeing - I know it was only the clouds, but it looked like - well, once I saw all the Comyn lords parading down the streets in Thendara with their banners, only this time they weren’t parading. They were chasing a girl - a girl with red hair, and she looked like you. Like you, Jaelle, and I thought for a moment it
was
you. And they all went galloping and galloping by over my head, and then I knew it was a real stampede through the hallucination, but you weren’t up in the sky dressed in Comyn robes, you were down in the canyon right in the middle of the stampede - ” She shuddered, and clutched at Jaelle.

“I saw the same thing,” said Jaelle almost in a whisper, but the noise of the rain drowned her out and she had to repeat it. She had not realized that the girl in the vision had worn her face. An irrational conviction kept saying,
that was my baby, and the Comyn will kill her
.

Magda said at last, “I have heard that
kireseth
can do strange things to people’s minds. There is an underground traffic in
kirian
resin in Thendara, you know. The stuff comes up from the plains of Valeron, and there are people who drink it for the visions it gives. Banned in the Terran Zone, of course, but people do go over the wall for it, the way they do for women. If we were breathing it, that explains… well. It’s over now.” She crumbled pieces of bread into the bark tea and fed it to Jaelle, like a child. Jaelle swallowed obediently. She could not remember when she had eaten last. The food and hot drink cleared away the last remnants of the fuzziness from her mind. Even the overwhelming horror of the murder receded. Maybe Magda was right. Maybe her memory was playing her tricks. If she could remember things she had forgotten since her mother died, how could she trust what she thought she knew? She could not do anything about it now, anyhow.

She said at last, shakily, “I don’t understand. How is it that you are here? You are supposed to be still housebound. If you forswore your Oath to save my life - it wasn’t worth it, Margali. I am not worth it.”

“You’re no judge of that right now,” said Magda coldly. “Go to sleep. As it happens, I didn’t break my oath. Camilla gave me leave to go. She loves you; you don’t seem to have realized that.” Her face was so grim that Jaelle could not bear it. Abruptly, in utter exhaustion, she dropped into a bottomless pit of sleep.

When she woke the fire had burned down to a dead pit of coals, the tiniest red eyes in the darkness, and Magda was curled up at her side; but Magda heard her stir and rolled over.

“Are you all right?”

“You saved my life again,” Jaelle whispered. “Oh,
breda
, I thought I was so brave, and I am such a coward, and I have failed at everything - you shouldn’t have risked your life for me -

“Hush, hush,” Magda whispered, holding her. “It’s all right.”

“Piedro - you know I killed him -

“You told me,” Magda said softly, but she could hear Magda’s thoughts, like colored spiderwebs in the curious darkness,
I don’t believe you did any such thing
. “Forget about Piedro.”

“Why should I forget him?” she flared, “I’ll forget him in my own time and my own way!” She did not know why she was filled with such murderous rage. “It’s not for you to say!”

“Jaelle, I only meant - I’m sorry for him. One of these days Montray will succeed in getting him kicked off Darkover - “