Moving Water (32 page)

He had found a tangle of clethra roots on the water's edge. His back was turned, bowed, so for one frightful moment I thought that stance betokened final disaster, surrender rather than defeat. Then I understood.

I recall thinking, with vicious outrage, that the greatest of all injustice was that Math's servants should suffer less from their enemies than from themselves. That it would cost him less to discover the atrocity, than to make himself turn around.

He looked up at me, eyes all black in a deathly face. His lips moved. When nothing emerged, he used mindspeech instead.

he said.

A great calmness came on me. “How many?” I said aloud. “Who?”

He hid his face. He added a rare detail.

As I steeled myself, for Callissa's sake as well as my own, he was driven to fill the pause.

Looking down at him huddled on the clethra roots, his nerve gone, when he had not hesitated to put his own hand in the fire, I reflected with still more bitter irony that it took kindness, not cruelty, conscience, not coal-lumps, to break the courage if you followed Math.

There was a rustle behind us. I knew it was Callissa before she spoke.

“Who is it?” She sounded calm. Steeled to meet the worst.

Beryx shrank like the most arrant cur. I put my arm round her, led her back into the scrub, and told her what he could not.

She did not break down. She did not so much as weep. She listened in silence, eyes bigger and bigger in a shrinking face. Then she left my arm and went back through the scrub. Beryx literally cowered. Standing in front of him she said quietly, “Don't. You said it to me. ‘Wherever we are, we have to go forward. And make the best of it.' ”

* * * * *

Fugitives were coming by then, in ones and twos found and guided by the Ulven into camp, shattered by the hunt, utterly baffled by its motives or those of their flight. Amver's cousin, one of Karis', Dakis' brother-in-law. I never admitted, and could never stamp out the last stupid flicker of hope that one day my parents would appear like that. Everything I knew of them, of the situation, told me otherwise, but hope is not a reasonable thing. It persisted till the day Beryx emerged from a thrithan clump looking even more flogged than usual. And this time his eyes came to me.

At such times instinct demands solitude. I do not recall going, but when he found me I was huddled into the cover of another heagar, beyond sight or earshot of the camp. Only when the van of the grief had passed, begun to alter into the will for revenge, into unslakeable hate, did he break in upon my thoughts.

—the very force of his will dragged my eyes up— I knew he felt it was hopeless and that only integrity compelled him to go on.

My eyes must have answered. His grew almost translucent.

—even in mindspeech I felt his anguish—

My expression cannot have changed.

He did not have to say, I too would find it all but impossible.

I was within a hairsbreadth of turning on him as I had in the vault, I could see the expectation in his eyes and knew that even now he would not fight back. I understood then that there are bloodier battles than those where armies massacre each other. And what a conquest is demanded of those who claim so much as the tithe of a right to say, “I follow Math.”

If I did not choke, it felt so. My very flesh seemed to boil with pain and hate and the need to hurt. When it subsided, I put up my hand and found, with no surprise, that there was sweat on my face as I had so often seen it on his.

He was smiling at me. A shaky, exhausted, radiant smile. I knew then that I had just won him his greatest triumph. That I had redeemed my past betrayals, that if the Lady finally vanquished him, I had bestowed his victory crown.

* * * * *

How much longer did it go on? More distortion of time. I remember, though, that the swamp began to dry, mud margins widening, trees shabby, sun staring from an ever-more-torrid sky. Then the first battalions of soggy, long-based silver clouds massing in the north, the heavier sultriness, and Amver saying, “The Wet won't be long.” I recall that because it was the day before the Lady opened her next charge.

Beryx could not look at us that morning. He would not even speak until Callissa, divining a crisis, half ran to him with the usual cup of tea and thrust him down on a rolled-up tent. It was to the cup that he finally spoke.

“She's . . . changed targets.” We all froze, half reprieved, half in deeper fear, for the new atrocity was plainly worse. He did not look up. “Your old corps. . . .”

All the eyes jerked to me. The words jerked in my throat.

“What about them? What?”

He put the cup down. His hand was steady. I do not know if it was control, or the torpor of being struck too much.

“She executed them. All of them. Last night. In the main square . . . Zyphryr Coryan.”

For a moment I shared his pain for innocents slain on my behalf, crueler in some ways than kinfolks' loss. They had done nothing, nothing at all. Merely served with me. Faces filled my mind, troopers and seconds and brother-officers, honest, loyal, blood-bound comrades with whom I had hammered out trust in so many battle lines. Now hung on gibbets like traitors, deserters, criminal dogs. For a moment it was too much. I learnt then that the battle is never over when the enemy is Ammath.

I came round with the taste of blood in my mouth and the nails driven clean through my palms. Beryx was watching me. With compassion, with comprehension. And now with the praise of a fellow-fighter who understands your victory. The most precious garland on earth.

“She's learning,” he said at last. “A clean sweep, because otherwise I'd have got some out. At night. And not kinfolk, because she knows this is worse . . . once you're bound by Math.”

It was Evis who exploded. “Then for the love of your cursed Math why don't you stop it! Fight her! Do something!”

Beryx came off the tent in a single bound and his eyes went green-shot white.

“By the Sky-lords' faces, you squalling pup, do you think I don't ache to tear the whole thing apart and stamp all over its guts? Do you think I want to sit like an owl on a stick and bleat to a bunch of ninnies about ‘Math'? Do you think I don't have to fight myself every mortal second not to go out there and take her on, here and now, and to your pits with the consequence, to the pits with everything so long as I can act!”

Evis nearly fell over. The rest of us recoiled, cowered, fled outright. We had seen him vexed, we had seen him touchy. We had never seen him in unbridled wrath.

He was breathing like a racehorse, face distorted, hand driven into his side. For a moment I saw what an aedr could be, as Th'Iahn had been, uncurbed by Math. Then I realized that this strategy had crossed not only his beliefs but his nature. A king, a general, it was born and bred and schooled into him in the face of disaster to react. To refuse had galled him so bitterly he had lost control not merely from stress, but in the revolt of instincts too long and too savagely denied.

The rage had already collapsed. “Oh, Four,” he groaned. “Oh, Four . . . I'm so sorry, Evis.” The remorse became despair. “Oh, when will I ever learn to follow Math?”

Though still fiery red, Evis was over shock and fear and struggling to swallow the rest. He answered unsteadily, “Sir, I should have known better. Don't blame yourself.”

They looked at each other. Then a wraith of humor woke in Beryx's eye. “I think,” he said with irony, “you'll have plenty of chances to get it right.”

* * * * *

The Lady worked through the army as she had through our kin. Every rankmate, fellow officer, friend, barest past or present acquaintance that she caught was executed in the basest way. Beryx saved some by the exhausting maneuver of tracing all our careers with Phathire, then breaking her command over possible victims and sending them off in flight, but they were heart-breakingly few. The chess war resumed. Some did escape. The others supplied another turn to her knife, but this time injustice mingled rage into our grief. And at times I mourned the Assharran army, in which I had been proud to serve, for whatever its allegiance it had been a fine service, and I sorrowed as for any skilled craftsmanship wrecked in wanton spite.

As that phase closed we all began to wonder what she would try next. Where humans can live is less miraculous than where they can laugh. We met our losses with silence, our wins with vicious delight, and we speculated on the future with that black wit you find in lulls along a sore-tried battle front. Beryx's condition was the one thing about which we could not jest.

He was skeleton thin, unable to eat. He still slept badly, recovering more and more slowly from his bouts of Ruanbrarx. And, we noted with silent apprehension, his physical strength had begun to fail.

By the third day after the army's release the tension had gone beyond jest. When Beryx retreated with lagging steps into a clethra stand we waited with a keener version of the old dread. We knew her capabilities now. We did not know her choice.

We had underestimated. He came out of the clethras like a bolting horse, halfway across the camp before he got control. “Oh, Four,” he said, turning in circles. “Oh, Four, I don't think I can handle this.”

Terrified, we rushed to calm him, sit him down, fetch tea. He would have none of it. He strode up and down as if driven by whips, raging to the indifferent air.

“How could she? How could she? Four, not the lousiest bandit, not the dirtiest mountain rat with four troopers in his tail and a half a yoke of Gebria to terrorize would—” His voice rose in anguish. “It's worse than incompetence—it's—it's—bestiality!”

“But sir,” pleaded Sivar, scurrying in his wake, “what's she done?”

He spun round. His eyes were crystalline light green, distilled rage.

“Tengorial. She turned the whole town out on the farms. Worse than an invasion—killing, wrecking, raping, burning—their own folk! And then she turned them on each other.” His eyes narrowed, fairly spitting. “Tengorial's ablaze and the citizens won't fight the fire, they're butchering each other in the streets. Etalveth's the same—but she used the garrison there.” He choked and whirled on his heel. “Four, the bloodiest usurper ever crowned never made his people tear their own country apart!”

“She must have gone mad.” Zyr was stunned. “Lost her wits.”

“Oh, not in the least!” He began to patrol with the same huge frenzied strides. “This time I can't do a thing. I can't anticipate, I can't prevent, I can't interfere. If I do, she just moves somewhere else. They don't have to mean something to us. Anyone will do. They're all Assharrans. All innocent. All her own—oh, Four, Four, how could she ever think of it!”

Words were on Evis' lips. They were on mine, but I held them there. I had said too often, Is this not a Must?

Wenver said it for me. “Sir, mightn't this be—the one thing too much?”

“No!” Beryx rounded on him. “It hasn't broken her power. For that she has to misuse the Well so completely that—I don't know what will happen, it'll shatter, blow up in her face, I can't guess. No, Four help me, this isn't the one thing too much.” The gale collapsed. “Except,” he sounded strained, “it may be too much for me.”

* * * * *

After that we watched him like a fever patient at crisis point. I have to confess, with shame, that Assharral's woes meant less than they ought to us. We had been through the fire. We felt for his pain, and we feared he would break, and we earnestly desired to live. Not only for survival, but because, despite all he had said, we wanted our revenge.

There was no march that day. The Ulven crept about the perimeter, Callissa made endless brews of tea, and the rest of us kept in earshot but beyond the thunder's range, while he scoured up and down, more than three quarters out of his wits.

A dozen times he checked to stand staring south, with rage, with grief, in an agony of opposed compulsions, only to wheel and start pacing again. Once he burst out, “Cursed woman!” Once he cried, “Oh, if only Fengthira was—” More than once he cried, “No!” and spun like a top, but what he was refusing we could not tell.

He brushed off Callissa's attempts to make him eat or drink, with his nearest ever approach to brusqueness, and presently I found the anxiety had acquired a sharper tooth. I knew now what Math required of a conqueror. It is not enough to defeat your enemy, or to forego retribution. You must also worst Ammath in yourself. Even if he did not crumple under the pressure, she had broken his guard. Outraged his ruler's instincts, the deepest sanctities of his life. He was perilously close to losing what he had called the real battle. Of succumbing to hatred. Falling into Ammath.