Moving Water (38 page)

As we entered the loggia, Beryx looked eagerly out into the smoke. Then he broke step, pausing, drawing in a long, long breath. “Now,” he said, and I knew he was invoking that promise made to Rema, for the dawn she would not see. “Now we can start.”

* * * * *

I followed them through the murk, half soaring willy-nilly on the updraft of that happiness, half crying in curdled hate and desperation, You can forgive her. Fengthira has. But how can we forgive all that she has done?

And then, in mouth-drying fear, How can you start, until you get past us?

We came down the last steps. Onto the threshold. Under Ker Morrya's gate. What plan, if any, Beryx had made, I have no idea. My own brain was dry. I saw the faces turn, the bodies jump, the action beginning, inevitable as the shift of a phalanx-front.

Evis and Sivar had sprung forward in relief. Zyr shouted, “Ha-ha—” and the Axairan triumph yell died in his throat. Before my eyes their faces turned to sword-blades, sharp and pitiless, all leveled on Moriana in our midst.

She had pulled from Beryx's arm, chin up and backbone stiffening, the softness gone. He tried to catch at her and she almost pushed him off. Her head went back as I had seen it on the parapet of Los Morryan. But though her eyes were huge and somber as Ker Morrya's smoke pall, the mockery, the cruel amusement had disappeared.

Before she could speak Beryx flung words out with bare desperate haste. “We stopped the fire—the mountain's back asleep!”

 It barely distracted them. Evis gave a brush of the hand. Wenver and Amver had let the boys go. They were all beginning to close in.

“I said
we
did it!” He had some authority back. As their eyes involuntarily came round he caught her hand and held it despite her jerk. “I couldn't have done it, without her.”

He stared around them, joy lost, all-too-helpless fear becoming something else. But this time Moriana spoke.

“I have renounced the Well,” she said.

It came flatly as an ultimatum. She would not sue mercy, excuse herself, let alone offer apologies to such a reception. But, I realized, she was trying to unbend. Doing a Morheage's best to announce amends.

 The stealthy, all but involuntary advance had stopped. Ost stared, Uster blinked, a moment's comprehension showed in Karis' eyes. The boys had crept forward, riveted as the rest. Quick, I besought some unknown god, let me weight the scalepan. Give me something to say.

I hesitated an instant too long. It was Zyr whose eyes slitted. Zyr whose voice, lowered to a gravel-slide, broke out, “The Well. And what about the rest? Our folk? The army? Assharral?”

“Zyr, stop!” Beryx shouted in pure panic this time. “I told you—don't let it make you Ammath!”

Evis half-checked. Zyr's eyes rolled, the glare of the berserker before he loses all control. And some great shove sent me leaping to stand braced like a shoulderman at Moriana's rather than Beryx's back.

“Wait,” I cried in turn. “Wait, stop—think!”

I had no weapon. I knew no weapon would help us now. I could only try to make my eyes say it. You've followed him this far. Will you destroy him in his first taste of happiness? Will you pervert yourselves and smash all hope of a future to avenge what, however cruelly, is already gone?

If nothing else, I could not add ignominiously, if you destroy me along with my lord, don't do it in front of my sons.

“Don't,” Beryx was saying huskily. The sweat was running down his jaw. “For the love of Math, Evis . . . Zyr . . . Wenver . . . wait. Think.” Something told me that if they refused he would not hinder them. Would not attack them, might not even resist. But they would only come to Moriana after they had hacked him apart at her feet.

“Try to—look forward.” His voice shook. “You needn't—fall in the pit. You can go on. Try to—to—”

To be more than human. To achieve what in all her time the Lady had never done. To make one giant's stride out, free, over the past, and arrive at magnanimity. Greatness of soul.

Math.

They were poised as Moriana had hung, a leaf in the wind's eye, on that parapet. But there was no mercy. No heed. Not in Evis, not in Wenver's, not in any of their eyes.

And as it all teetered to the precipice edge, Zem piped up.

He had wormed to Evis' side. I have no idea how much he understood. Probably, I fear, far too much. But he spoke with his age's single-minded satisfaction at a long-standing puzzle solved.

“So that,” he said, “is what you planned to do with her.”

For a moment we were all paralyzed. Then Moriana's eyes flamed. Evis' jaw dropped and Beryx yelled in awful consternation, “Zem, you wretch!”

Moriana rounded on him. He literally ducked. “It wasn't like that!”

“Oh, it wasn't, was it?” She had turned whiter than on that parapet. “You dared talk about me like a—a—and to a child!”

She swung at him, a barrack-room roundhouse. He howled, “I never said a word, I never thought, I swear it. . . .” She charged him and he actually ran, round Fengthira and back behind me, the good arm over his head like a farmer caught in hail. Moriana swept down on us both. I had no time for fight or flight. He yelled across my shoulder, panicked to the point of burlesque, “I did tell you, I had plans!”

He was cowering like the most hen-hearted recruit behind a sentry-post, holding me before him one-handed, peering past my neck. I did not have to see how it looked. That was written in Moriana's face beside me, the eyes huge, the skin white, the mouth. . . .

The mouth suddenly twitching uncontrollably. The face's mask shattering, the eyes, yet again, turning to sheets of black-shot mist. And then, bursting out like a dam gone down, the full depth of that waterfall laugh.

How could the most vendetta-crusted blood-thirst resist that?

I can see Evis crumbling behind her, the swept-away look on Zyr's face. Karis and Wenver had succumbed, it swept the circle like some new, precious plague. I felt the rocks buckle in my own memory's wall. Saw the future rise beyond the rubble at last, clear and irresistible as a trumpet calling, Stand down.

When the flood ebbed Beryx was still lurking, wringing the moment to its last. Moriana caught her breath along with us. Then she spluttered and cried, “Oh, you fool! Come out!”

He crept out, not done burlesquing himself. She gave him one fulminating, not wholly counterfeit glower. Then it changed.

“You did that on purpose.” It was half outrage, half disbelief. “Ran away . . . Pretended. . . .” Her voice rose. “Deliberately!”

He looked at her under his lashes. Though in his bent head that mock-timidity lingered, the corners of his mouth had crept up. But it was not foolery, when he spoke.

He said, “The Ulven called me, Rainmaker.”

Because the crippled wizard will end the Assharran drought.

I remembered, then, what it had meant. Leveled in that laughter's wake I understood, through flesh and blood's reality, what it meant now: my chest's enlargement, my blood moving, heart and spirit released. As if the hate had been not merely a wall but stasis, stagnation, the suspension of time that drought imposes. A living death.

And now it had broken. Life, water, time, could move again.

The others remembered too. But a different memory, more than understanding, was moving like another freshet in Moriana's stare.

Then she turned her head and looked me full in the face.

“Alkir”—that lovely liquid voice was lovelier for the evil it had sloughed—“we can't go back. And no recompense would be enough. But we could go on—couldn't we?” And she held out her hand.

T'would need a Velandyr, I heard Fengthira saying, to amend that. And, unless tha dost the same, t'will be fare-thee-well 'twixt him and thee. But the choice had already been made, in my own mind. My own heart.

Her fingers curled, slight and fragile as vine stems, round mine. I heard Beryx say low and thickly, “Well done.” I did not ask which of us he meant. I felt the spring of his joy waken, though, as I looked at the others. And if his eye had pleaded, I did my utmost to make mine a fierce command.

They understood. And at the last, they could not turn their backs on the liberation that had taken them, however unawares.

Evis conceded first, advancing with past hate and present disapproval and undigested laughter still mingled in his look. As Moriana met his eye an answer woke in hers. But she bit her lip ferociously, and it sounded almost earnest when she spoke.

“Whatever we say will be . . .” impossible, I supplemented. An insult, a grotesquerie, or a wound too raw to touch. “But. . . .”

She pulled her chin up in that old implacable way. But I saw her shoulders brace, before, again, she put out her hand.

Evis took it, perforce. With a pause, a gingerliness close to revulsion. Then past training rescued him. He bowed over her fingers and uttered a cliché from another life. “I wish you happy, ma'am.” His eye found Beryx's suddenly radiant face and he amended with no reservation and no effort at all, “Happier than anyone could ask.”

One by one the rest followed, mumbling something, clasping hands. Stepping back, with a look of woken wonder on each face. Until only Zyr remained.

He glowered at us across the shifting but persistent glacis they had all left. His narrow bronze-red face was laconic at the best of times and now quite inscrutable, but in the pause I heard Beryx suddenly catch his breath.

Moriana stiffened. She did not put out her hand. I would have prayed, if I had a god left, that the pride, the mockery, had not revived in her eyes.

Zyr looked at Beryx instead.

Beryx did not speak, but I knew what his eyes would say. Don't hold back, they would beg. Do this for your own sake. It's human, it's natural to grieve and demand punishment and thirst for revenge exacted in blood, but don't do it. Be more than human. Cleave to Math.

Zyr looked back to Moriana. He jerked one shoulder to the corpses under the arch and said evenly, “For me, you should be hanging with them.” He paused. “But. . . .”

His eyes flicked to Beryx again, and that glance said it all. If I can't do this for your reasons, neither can I deny you. What you made me feel. That moment's overwhelming, cleansing laughter, when the hate broke. I will do this for what
you
mean to me.

Then he caricatured an imperial salute and took a step back. I will not touch you, said that dour glance, in reconciliation. But I will sanction your passage. Into amnesty. Into hope.

Moriana's chin came down. Beryx bent his head. Softly, huskily, and I could feel with what intensity, he said, “Thank you, Zyr.”

* * * * *

And I remember the next advance, that evening, after a trial restoration in Ker Morrya: a dozen different work-parties to clear debris, stable horses, forage dinner, gather splintered furniture for firewood, organize quarters, succor the corpses at the gate. Barricade the gate itself.

We gathered in a cleansed piece of the great gallery, lit by tallow dips in silver candelabra, reclining on salvaged cushions or Phaxian cloaks, as we ate pot-luck soup and griddle cakes and drank barley-spirit too raw even for looters from a crystal decanter they had missed. Beryx and Moriana presided, sharing his cloak, with Fengthira on his right and me on Moriana's left; which might still have been unnerving, had she ever been aware of me. As of course she was not.

When the motley cups were charged there came a sudden pause. I had felt it happening all afternoon: the recurring tug-of-heart between hope and resurrected memory, the embers of grief and hate rousing, to be re-drowned by another deluge of their joy. This time it was clearer, simpler. The moment, the action, demanded the stamp of ritual. But was it to be a mourners' wake? Or a betrothal feast?

Fengthira glanced sideways and sighed. Neither Beryx nor Moriana heard. She looked past, with irony and mockery and the involuntary, if often wry smile forced from all who looked at them, and told me, “Tha'll do. Give us a toast.”

I stood up. Cleared my throat. Cleared it again. Waited. Bellowed, “Stand to!” They leapt apart, the audience fell apart. Beryx gave me a wrathfully merry look. I gave them the toast.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

In a moment, Zyr's hand relaxed. Then Evis lifted his cup. Wenver and Ost nodded, looking past me too. “Tomorrow,” they repeated, and tipped their cups.

Beryx and Moriana drank with us, with fitting solemnity. But they drank to each other, which Fengthira found too much.

“Hark'ee,” she said. “This billing and cooing's half-measure to ye, and no use to us. Get y'selves off to the real thing—if ye can find a bed that's fit for it.”

Beryx blushed. Moriana dropped her eyelids, smiled wickedly, and pulled him to his feet. She glanced down at Fengthira, and Fengthira anticipated the sally in her look.

“If th'art foundered by morning, remember, t'was thee schooled him to do without sleep.”

That routed Moriana at last. As she went crimson Beryx said irately, “ 'Thira, that's enough!” and hauled her doorward before Fengthira could show just how little his orders weighed with her.