Gate of Ivrel Page 9

  "I must tell you," he continued hoarsely, "I think Chya Liell will follow when he can gather the forces. I think he lied to us in much, liyo. "

  "What was it happened back there, Vanye?"

  He sought to tell her. He gathered the words, still could not. "He is a strange man," he said, "and he was anxious that I desert you. He attempted twice to persuade me— this last time in plain words."

  She frowned at him. "Indeed. What form did this proposal take?"

  "That I should forget my oath and go with him."

  "To what?"

  "I do not know." The remembering made his voice shake; he thought that she might detect the tremor, and quickly gathered up the black's reins and flung himself into the saddle. "The first time— I almost went. The second— somehow I preferred your company."

  Her odd pale face stared up at him in the starlight. "Many of the house of Leth have drowned in that lake. Or have at least vanished there. I did not know that you were in difficulty. I would not gladly have left you. I did judge that there was some connivance between you and Liell: so when you did not follow— I dared not delay there between two who might be enemies."

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  "I was reared Nhi," he said. "We do not oath-break. We do not oath-break, liyo. "

  "I beg pardon," she said, which liyo was never obliged to say to ilin, no matter how aggrieved. "I failed to understand."

  And at that moment the horses shied, exhausted as they were, heads back and nostrils flaring, whites of the eyes showing in the dim light.

  Something reptilian slithered on four legs, whipping serpentwise into the thicker brush. It had been large and pale,-leprous in color. They could still hear it skittering away.

  Vanye swore, his stomach still threatening him, his hands managing without his mind, to calm the panicked horse.

  "Idiocy," Morgaine exclaimed softly. "Thiye does not know what he is doing. Are there many such abroad?"

  "The woods are full of beasts of his making," Vanye said. "Some are shy and harm no one. Others are terrible things, beyond belief. They say the Koris-wolves were made, that they were never so fierce and never man-killers before—" He had almost said, before Irien, but did not, in respect of her. "That is why we must not sleep here, lady. They are made things, and hard to kill."

  "They are not made," she said, "but brought through. But you are right that this is no good place to rest. These beasts— some will die, like infants thrust prematurely into too chill or too warm a place: some will be harmless; but some will thrive and breed. Ivrel must be sweeping a wide field. Ah, Vanye, Thiye is an ignorant man. He is loosing things— he knows not what. Either that or he enjoys the wasteland he is creating."

  "Where do they come from, such things as that?"

  "From places where such things are natural. From other tonights, and other Gates, and places where that was fair and proper. And there will be no native beasts to survive this onslaught if it is not checked. It is not man 79

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  that such an attack wars on— it is nature. The whole of Andur-Kursh will find such things straying into its meadows. Come. Come."

  But he had lost his inclination to sleep, and kept the reins in his own hand.

  He closed his eyes as Morgaine set them on their way again, still saw the pale lizard form, large as a man, running across the open space. That was one of the witless nonsensities in Koriswood, more ugly than dangerous.

  Reports told of worse. Sometimes, legend said, carcasses were found near Irien, things impossible, abortions of Thiye's art, some almost formless and baneful to the touch, and others of forms so fantastical that none would imagine what aspect the living beast had had.

  His only comfort in this place was that Morgaine herself was horrified; she had that much at least of human senses to her. Then he remembered her coming to him, out of the place she called between, washed up, she said, on this shore.

  He began to have dim suspicion what she was, although he could not say it in words: that Morgaine and the pale horror had reached Andur-Kursh in the same way, only she had come by no accident, had come with purpose.

  Aimed at Gates, at Thiye's power.

  Aimed at dislocating all that lay on this shore, as these unnatural things had come. Standing where the Hjemur-lord stood, she would be no less perilous. She shared nothing with Andur-Kursh, not even birth, if his fears were true, and owed them nothing. This he served.

  And Liell had said she lied. One of the twain lied: that was certain. He wondered in an agony of mind how it should be if he learned of a certainty, that it was Morgaine.

  Something else fluttered in the dark— honest owl, or something sinister; it passed close overhead. He tautened his grip upon his nerves and patted the nervous black's neck.

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  It was long until the morning, until in a clear place upon the trail they dared stop and let sleep take them by turns. Morgaine's was the first sleep, and he paced to keep himself awake, or chose an uncomfortable place to sit, when he must sit, and at last fell to meddling with the black horse's gear, that the horse still bore, for in such place they dared not unsaddle, only loosened the girths. It shamed him, to have stolen a second time; and he felt the keeping of more than he needed of the theft was not honorable, but all the same it was not sense to cast things away. He searched the saddlebags and kit to learn what he had possessed and, it was in the back of his thoughts, to learn something of the man Liell.

  He found an object which answered the question, such that set his stomach over.

  It was a medal, gold, set in the hilt of a saddle knife, the sort many a man bore beneath the skirt of his saddle; and on it was a symbol of the blockish, ugly look he had seen graven on the Stones. It was qujalin.

  Whenever any strange and long-ago things were found, folk called them qujalin and avoided them, or burned them, or cast them into deeps and tried to lose them. Most such were likely only forgotten oddities, Kurshin and harmless. Somehow he did not think this was such as that.

  He showed it to Morgaine when she wakened to take her turn at watch.

  "It is an irrhn, " she said to him. "A luck-piece. It has no other significance." But she turned it over and over in her hands, examining it.

  "It is no luck," said Vanye, "to a human man."

  "There is qujalin blood mixed in Leth," she said, "and Liell is its tutor.

  Tutors have ruled there nigh a hundred years. Each of the heirs of Leth has produced a son and drowned within the year. If Kasedre is capable of siring a son, he will most probably join his ancestors, and Liell will still be tutor to the son. I wonder—" she added irrelevantly, looking at the blade,

  "who sired Hshi and Tlin."

  "And on what," Vanye muttered sourly. "Keep the blade, liyo. I do not want to carry it, and perhaps it may bring luck to you."

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  "I am not qujal, " she said.

  That assertion, he reflected, might have filled him with either doubt or relief some days ago, at their meeting; now it fitted uncomfortably well with the thing he had begun to suspect of her.

  "Whatever you are," he said, "spare me the knowing of it."

  She nodded, accepting his attitude without apparent offense. She slipped the knife within her belt and rose.

  A green-feathered arrow hit the ground between her feet.

  She reached to her back, hand to weapon, quick as the arrow itself. And as quick, Vanye seized her and pushed her, heedless of hurting: Chya warning, that arrow. If she fired, they would both be green-feathered in an instant.

  "Do not," he appealed to her, and turned, both arms wide, toward their unseen observers. "Hai, Chya! Chya! will you put kin-slaying on your souls? We are clan-welcome with you, cousins."

  Brush rustled. He watched the fair, tall men of his own mother's kindred slip out of the shadows, where surely a few more kept arrows trained upon their hearts; and he set himself deliberately
between them and Morgaine's own arrogance, which was like a Myya's for persistence, and likely to be the death of her.

  They did not even ask names of them, but stood there waiting for them to speak and identify themselves. Looking at the living person of one who had been minutely described in ballads a century ago, wondering perhaps if they were not mad— he could estimate what passed in their minds. They only stared at Morgaine, and she at them, furiously, in her hand a weapon that could deal death faster than their arrows.

  They would kill her of course, if she could die; but she would have done considerable damage: and her ilin who was her shield would be quite dead. He had heard of a certain Myya who strayed the border and was 82

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  found with three Chya arrows lodged in his heart, all touching. Clan Chya lived in a hard land. They were impressed by few threats. It was typical of them that they had not yielded and begged shelter from the encroaching beasts, as had other folk; or died, as had two others. They used Hjemur's vile beasts for game, and harried the border of Hjemur and kept Thiye contained out of sheer Chya effrontery.

  Vanye placed hands on thighs and made a respectful bow, which Morgaine did not: she did not move, and it was possible that the Chya did not know that they were in danger.

  "I am Nhi Vanye, i Chya," he said, " ilin to this lady, who is clan-welcome with Chya."

  The leader, a smallish man with the simple braid of a second- uyo, cousin-kin to the main clan, grounded his longbow and set both hands upon it, eyes upon him. "Nhi Vanye, cousin to Chya Roh. You are i Chya, that is true, but I thought it was understood that you are not clan-welcome here."

  "She is," he said, which was the proper answer: an ilin was not held to his own law when he served his liyo: he could trespass, as safe or as threatened as she was. "She is Morgaine kri Chya, who has a clan-welcome that was never withdrawn."

  They were frightened. They had the look of men watching a dream and trying not to become enmeshed in it. But they looked from her to the gray horse Siptah and back again, and swords stayed sheathed and bows lowered.

  "We will take you to Ra-koris," said the little man. "I am Taomen, tan-uyo. "

  Then Morgaine gave him a bow of courtesy, and Vanye kept his silence hereafter, as befitted a servant whose liyo had finally deigned to take matters into her own hands.

  The Chya were not happy at the meeting, it was clear. Clan-welcome had not been formally withdrawn because surely it had seemed a pointless 83

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  vengeance on the dead. And the young lord of Chya, Chya Roh, his own cousin, whom he had never seen, still pursued bloodfeud with Nhi for the sake of his mother's dishonor at the hands of Rijan. Roh would as soon put an arrow through him as would Myya Gervaine, he was sure, and probably with greater accuracy.

  * * *

  There was a vast clearing in the Koriswood, that the noon sun blessed with a pleasant glow; the whole of it was full of sprawling huts of brush and logs— Chya, the only clan without a hall of stone. Once there had been the old Ra-koris, a splendid hall, home of the High Kings; its ruin lay some distance from this, and it was alleged to be haunted by angry ghosts of its proud defenders, that had held last and hardest against the advance of Hjemur. The grandsons and great-grandsons of the warriors of Morgaine's age kept only this wooden hall, their possessions few and their treasures gone, only their bows and their skill and the gain of their hunting between them and starvation. Yet none of them looked sickly, and the women and children watching them as they rode in were straight and tall, though plain: there was beauty in this people, much different from the blighted look of clan Leth. Boys raced ahead of them, yet all was strangely silent, as though they maintained hunter's discipline even in their home.

  At the great arch of the main hut the greatest number of people had gathered, and here they dismounted, escorted still by Taomen and his men.

  They retained their weapons, and all was courtesy, men yielding back for them in haste.

  Ra-koris was a smoky, earth-floored hall of rough logs, yet it had a certain splendor: it had two levels and many halls opening off the main room.

  Tasseled and wrought hides were the hangings, antlers and strange horns adorned its posts. It was lit by torches even at noontime, and by a hearth larger than many halls of stone could boast, its only masonry, that great hearth and its venting.

  "Here you will be lodged until Roh can be called," said Taomen.

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  Morgaine chose to settle at the main hearth, and by the timorous charity of the hall women, they were served a plain meal of waybread and venison and Chya mead, which they found good indeed after the suspect fare of Leth.

  But folk avoided them, and watched them from the shadows of the wooden hall, whispering together.

  Morgaine ignored them all and rested. Vanye nursed his sore hand and finally, troubled by the heat in the hall, at last gave up his pride and removed helm and coif, probing the soreness of the base of his skull, where Liell had struck him. A youth of the Chya laughed: a youth who did not yet even wear the braid; and Vanye looked at him angrily, then bowed his head and ignored the matter. He was not in such a position that he could complain of their treatment of him. Morgaine must be his chief concern, and she theirs.

  And late in the day, when the bit of sky visible through the little windows of the high arch had gone from sun to shadow, there was a stir at the door and hunters came, men in brown leather, armed with bows and swords.

  And among them was one that Vanye knew would be close kin of his, even before the youth came forward and met them as lord of the hall: for he had seen high-clan Chya before; when he was a child, and this was the image of all of them— of himself as well. The young lord looked more like a brother than his own brothers did.

  "I am Chya Roh," he said, stepping to the center of the rhowa, the earthen platform at the head of the hall. His lean, tanned features were set with anger at their presence, boding no good for them. "Morgaine kri Chya is dead," he said, "a hundred years ago. What proof do you bear that you are she?"

  Morgaine unfolded upward from her cross-legged posture with rare grace, smooth and silken, and without a bow of courtesy offered an object into Vanye's hand. He arose with less grace, paused to look at the object before he passed it into Roh's hand: it was the antlered insignia of the old High 85

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  Kings of Koris, and when he saw that he knew it for a great treasure, and one that might have formed part of the lost crown treasury.

  "It was Tiffwy's," she said. "His pledge of hospitality— should I need it, he said, to command of his men what I would."

  Roh's face was pale. He looked at the amulet, and clenched it in his fist, and his manner was suddenly subdued. "Chya gave you what you asked a hundred years ago," he said, "and not a man of the four thousand returned.

  You have much blood on your hands, Morgaine kri Chya; and yet I must honor my ancestor's word— this once. What do you seek here?"

  "Brief shelter. Silence. And whatever knowledge you have of Thiye and Hjemur."

  "All three you may have," he said.

  "Did Chya's record survive?"

  "The Ra-koris you know is ruin now. Wolves and other beasts have it to themselves. If Chya's Book survives, that is where it lies. We have no means nor leisure for books here, lady."

  She bowed in courtesy. "I have a warning to give you: Leth is roused. We left them in some little stir. Guard your borders."

  Roh's lips were thin. "You are gifted with the raising of storms, lady. We will set men to watch your trail. It may be Leth will come this far, but only if they are desperate. We have taught Leth manners before."

  "They are mightily irritated. Vanye's horse is Leth-bred, and we quit their hospitality suddenly, in a dispute with lord Kasedre and his counselor Chya Liell."

  "Liell," said Roh softly. " That black wolf. I commend the quality of your enemies, lady. How much welcome do you ask?"

&n
bsp; "The night only."

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  "Are you bound north?"

  "Yes," she said.

  Roh bit his lip. "That old quarrel? They say Thiye lives. It has never been in our imagination that you could survive too. But we are through giving you men, lady. That is done. We have none left to spare you."

  "I ask none."

  "You take this?" It was Roh's one acknowledgement that Vanye lived; his proud young eyes shifted aside and back again. "You could do better, lady."

  But then he went and bade his women make place for Morgaine in the upper levels of the hall, and separate place for Vanye by the hearth. This Morgaine allowed, for Chya was a proper hall, and they were indeed under its peace as they had not been in Leth. And after that Morgaine and Roh talked together some little time, asking and answering, until she finally took her leave and passed upstairs.

  Then Vanye gratefully put off his armor, down to his shirt and his leather breeches, and prepared the blankets they had given him by the warm hearthside.

  Taomen came, spoke to him softly and bade him come to Roh; it was a thing he could not refuse. Roh sat cross-legged on the rhowa, with other men about him.

  Of a sudden Vanye's feeling of ease left him. There was merry noise elsewhere in the hall, busy chatter of women and of children; it continued, masking softer words, and there were men ringed about so that no one outside the circle could see what was done there.

  He did not kneel, not until they made it clear he must; then all the uyin of the Chya sank down on their haunches about him and about Roh, swords laid before them, as when clan judgment was passed.

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  He thought of crying aloud to Morgaine, warning her of treachery; but he did not truly fear for her, and his own pride kept him silent. These were his kin: to trouble an ilin for a family matter violated honor, violated the very concepts of honor under the ilin-codes, but Roh's offense was a powerful one. He did not know this cousin of his: his hope of Roh's honor was scant, but it kept him from utter panic.