Red Country (19 page)

It was late, already sunset; in a moment he would emerge, doubtless with another sneer at my poor management, and this time I was going to fire back. I mixed and boiled and prodded with every hackle ready, but he did not appear.

Twilight faded. It would soon be full dark. Crossly, I called,
Zam?

No reply. We might as well be married, I grumbled, stalking up to the cave, we quarrel so well already. . . . I yelled, “Are you eating or not?”

There was no reply.

Ill-humor and belligerence shed together, I shot back to the fire, snatched two half-burnt sticks, and dived into the cave.

Shelves tumbled with junk, saddlebags and clothes strewn in true male confusion, a bough-bed on the floor, it all remained vague impressions. My attention was for Zam, sprawled out among it in very nearly the same position in which I had last seen Zem.

I snatched a wrist. Gasped in relief. Slapped his arm, his face. Scurried for a cupful of water to douse his head. Another. He coughed, groaned and squirmed. I stuck the sticks in a convenient cranny and struggled to sit him up.

Nothing is so heavy as an unconscious human, and a solid-built man is the heaviest. I was still puffing and heaving when he got a hand under him, then said in faint but determined mindspeech,

“Oh, certainly! You just felt like a doze. You benighted idiot!” Relief made me savage, his weight on my shoulder had me intensely conscious of our proximity, knowledge of his empathy made me twitchier than the greenest girl. “What in the Four's name have you been doing?”

He said still more faintly, And I felt my temper go.

“Of all the numbskulls that ever went two-legged! You might have had the sense to eat something first, to say what you were up to, to wait till you'd rested, you—”

A stick flared and showed his face. Downbent, exhausted, forming to numb endurance before the fresh storm about to break.

I stopped dead. “Lean on this.” I hauled up indiscriminate debris. “I'll bring your dinner in. Tea first.”

He did not argue. He did not resist, even when I held the first cupful to his lips, and when he said, at the second, “I can hold it,” it was with quite unwonted docility.

“Lamp,” he added. “Over there.”

“Over there” was half-buried on a shelf, beside a jar of Everran hethel oil. The clearer, brighter light showed enough of the cave to make my fingers positively itch with housewifely zeal, but I sternly repressed it. Or so I thought, until I glanced round to see him with a hand over one ear and his head pulled away, like a sick man tortured by some hideously loud and endless noise.

“Oh, Four!” I said, realizing that my thoughts were to him the equivalent of an unbroken tirade, and with that skill once learnt in Hethria completely emptied my mind.

In the curious half-awareness of that state I saw him look up at me, incredulous. His mouth opened. Some expression crossed his face, too fleeting to decipher. Then he averted his eyes and spoke with such awkwardness it could only have been concealed gratitude.

“Thank you. But there's no need.”

Unleashing my mind, I asked quickly, “Did the sandstorm work?” If questions forced him to answer, they also focused my mind to pay attention, which at the moment seemed the kinder thing.

“Mm. The hostages are all safe, and the Sathellin are out. So I wiped off the roads with it first. Hethria is sealed. And no one touched the Gebros today.”

“Good,” I said. “How much had they done?”

“After you left they began at Gebasterne too. Between them, they've leveled a good forty miles.” I exclaimed in horror. “But they haven't shifted the blocks. I used Fengthir on some agitators and arranged a carter's strike.” He took the copper bowl I used as a plate. “It won't tell Kastir anything he doesn't know. My hand was clear from the moment I expelled those spies.”

My elation faltered. He did not help with the somber comment, “I don't know how long I can hold the sandstorm. Once it starts, I can sit back till the wind drops, but there's a limit. I can't blow all Hethria away.”

“Four!” I exclaimed. “Just start a westerly in Everran and blow it back!”

He finished the food and drank another cup of tea before he said, and to my utter amazement it came with a wry smile, “I never thought of that.”

“No one can think of everything.” I tried to hide smugness, aware it was unsuccessful, and the lamp showed me the shimmer of laughter in his eyes.

“I'm not proud. You can say, I told you so.”

Hastily, I avoided a quarrel in embryo by collecting the plate. With unnerving insight he said, “You needn't go so soon. This isn't a shrine.”

I tried to turn it off with a laugh. “I'm likely to offend you by thinking what I think of it if I stay.”

“Your fingers rightfully itch. Fengthira would box my ears.” He surveyed the chaos, while I tried and failed to suppress the giggle such an image provoked. “I can tidy up tomorrow.”

“Oh, no, you won't.” I abandoned tact. “Tomorrow you'll go down there under the finlythes and sleep.”

The shimmer was back in his eyes, somewhat drier now. “You sound more like Fengthira every day.”

“That”—I seized the cup—“is more than enough to make me go.” But his last words followed me out, low, tentative, yet unmistakable.

“Thank you—Sellithar.”

* * * * * *

He did sleep most of the next two days, without nightmares, and with only one minor clash, when he found me at work on the saddle quern and said promptly, “I'll do that.” I retorted, “Since when have I needed a scullion?” He snapped, “Since when have you run the camp?” I fired back, “Since you decided to stop Estar by yourself!”

At which, to my wonder, he stopped dead. Compressed his lips, then said with forced politeness, “Very well. You thought of blowing back the sand. Now may I, please, take a turn on that?” Which disarmed me beyond defense.

The third day the easterly died, and had to be renewed. Next day I was contemplating two lizards and a handful of yams when he came quickly out of the cave, saying, “You were right. He's clever, that man.”

“What's he done?” I cried.

“Offered the demolition crews double pay, found them Sathel headcloths, begun tunneling to undermine the wall. And had himself hypnotized again.” Absently, he took up the knife I used for kitchen work and gutted a lizard with one deft stroke. “You said you know him. What will he have in mind?”

My heart jumped into my throat and stuck. A boast is one thing. It is another to issue predictions which may decide the outcome of an entire war.

Playing for time, I asked, “Couldn't you get rid of the hypnotist?”

“He could find another. Estar has plenty of people. You told me so.”

Rather wildly, I said, “Another agitator might assassinate him. . . .” And reneged in a hurry at his look. “No, I know you can't do that. Math and all the rest of it.” He tossed one lizard in the pan and took another, while I forced myself to think.

“Aloud,” he said. “Formulate it. You're jumping too fast.”

“Kastir has no scruples,” I said slowly. “He's studied the lore on aedryx. He knows about you. He probably knows the sandstorm's not natural.” Zam nodded. “He always told me, ‘Never mind effects, erase the cause.' And . . . he favors pre-emptive strikes.”

“So we can look for raiders here.”

“Not here, surely?” His uncannily quick deduction stampeded me past a functional response.

“He has the spies. They know of Eskan Helken, he must connect us. They could steer by the stars.”

Fiercely I longed for Karyx and his men to act as sentries, however fallible.

“The horses will see them, if I don't. There's a sandstorm too.” The second lizard landed in the pan. “And there are a hundred things I could do if they came. Zem would have loved it. He could have shown them illusions, run them in circles, teased them crazy.”

A sharp pang of loss restored Zem saying, “I'd have teased you to perdition.”

Zam glanced at me and away. “I don't have a sense of humor, but I'll manage. What worries me is what he may be doing elsewhere.”

“He has plenty of support,” I said slowly. “And he is very stubborn.”

Zam rejoined bleakly, “I know.”

* * * * * *

When the wind dropped again Zam turned it westerly, which brought on another fainting spell. But next morning he emerged looking perfectly haggard, to announce, “Kastir has moved. While the wind was down he sent a cavalry squadron with a Sathel guide to make a dash for the first dassyk on Phallstir Ven. The northern road.”

“Oh Four!” I leapt up, tumbling flourcakes broadcast. “They mustn't get there, they'll—what have they planned? Occupy it?” He nodded. “Stop them! The sandstorm, a Command—anything!”

“It isn't so simple.” He sounded grim. “I can misdirect them, reverse them, stop them in their tracks. But whatever I do now, they'll ride into the sandstorm. Then they're finished. And it's no pleasant way to die.”

“But if they make the dassyk there'll be fighting, they'll kill Sathellin, some of the refugees might be—send them back!”

His eyes were frigid. “That is your advice?”

“My ad—Four above, no general would need it. His men or ours, our dassyk, we can stop them—What are you waiting for?”

“I am waiting,” he spoke with the adamance of granite, “because I am not a general. And to kill men is against Math.”

“Math! A deadly dangerous scout-raid going on under your nose, and you muddle about like some granddad trying to kill a spider, any half-cured lieutenant could solve it—but you burble about Math! This is real life!”

His mouth was set rigid. “I know it is. Their lives.”

“Oh, you—you bird-brain—! What do principles matter here? It's strategy, it's imperative! It's pure commonsense! You're in a stick-fork already—they'll be killed whatever you do. But if it's at the dassyk they'll take our people with them—people on your side, people who trust you, people you're claiming to
protect!
”

He stood up, colder and more forbidding than ever, and said icily, “Since you can offer nothing constructive and your mind is stuck in its political cesspit, I'll do the thing myself. My way. Thank you, I don't want breakfast.” And he fairly stormed back to the cave.

I raged about my morning tasks, in arms against him, myself, the suspense, the risk. I invoked every argument Kastir or any other strategist had ever shown me, I raved at the lunacy of his wretched principles, I foamed at the idea of renouncing logic and frothed at the mere thought of admitting defeat.

It was no good. Whatever the facts were in the desert, a closer fact stared me in the face. Sensible or not, Zam believed in Math.

Finally I surrendered. I made a pot of mint-tea, bore it up to the cave, and called meekly, “Zam?”

He appeared like a jack-in-a-box, and I said my piece before some fresh lunacy could make it miscarry.

“All right, you believe in Math and that's all there is to it. I'm sorry I yelled at you. Would you like some tea, and will you tell me what's going on?”

For a moment he seemed frozen. Only the light flashed at incredible speed in those gray eyes.

Then he said jerkily, “I'm sorry myself. You have your own principles—I should have—I mean, you weren't to—at least, it was commonsense.” He abandoned the unequal struggle for both tact and truth. “Will you come in? The tea—I'd like some, yes.”

In unimproved chaos and shaky amity we sat drinking it on the floor, both afraid that any speech would start us off again. Finally he said, “I turned them round. I can send them south round the storm and back to Gebasterne. It means shepherd-work all the way, but it's better than—the rest.”

“Oh!” I cried. “Why couldn't you have—I mean—oh, Four, you know what I mean.” All of it, my exasperation that he had not thought of it before, my anxiety that saying so would re-start the war, my awareness that he was aware of all that, even of my awareness that he was aware. . . . “This is like a funnel,” I said in despair. “You just go round and down and in and round and down and in—”

“Until you disappear up your own backside and settle everything.”

He said it spontaneously. Then he stared at my shriek of laughter, and looked first astounded, then incredulous, then ludicrously pleased with himself.

“I think,” he said, “I made a joke.”

“You did. Oh, you did!” My ribs ached. Not that the joke was particularly funny. It was the over-reaction to tension, and his own response. “Kastir will never know what a wonder he produced.”

“No,” Zam agreed, with the faintest shimmer of that aedric smile in his eyes. “He won't.”

* * * * * *

After that he was so busy “shepherding” that he only appeared to eat. However, the thing seemed to be going well. Until he stamped out of the cave at dawn, face white, whiter eyes flaring like a heat-hazed sky, so after one look I leapt out of my cloak and cried, “What's he done?”

“That—” He cut it off, an almost canine rumble in his throat. “I turned the wind southwest so they could get back safe. When they came into Gebasterne, he sentenced them as deserters. Then he hung them over the gate.”

“Oh—Zam!”

He took three furious strides away from me, over the fireplace and back. He was breathing hard, each breath exploded from his nostrils in a horse-like snort.

“The wind dropped today, so I can see what else he's done. He's been firing raiding parties into that hell-fog for five mortal days, just firing them off like stones and trusting that if he sent enough, one of them must hit a dassyk.” His jawbone showed under a line of whitened skin. “All over the Hethmel there are men and horses dying. Dying! They went round in circles, they were caught in sandhills, they couldn't even see the stars. They died of smothering. Or thirst.”