The Ancient Enemy (2 page)

But Thru didn't even notice her. The sea lilies he had held so tightly fell from his grip one by one, and he slipped out the gate like a ghost.

Thru slid into a melancholy from which none of his friends could shake him. He became reclusive, taking long hikes up into the hills, living wild for a week at a time. He spent so much time up on Huwak Mountain that he became acquainted with the resident wolf pack, which he watched hunting elk on the high meadows and chasing rabbits in the valleys. He knew each individual and had names for all of them, from Uncle Grey down to Blackbird, the little female with the dark tip to her tail. Their primary den was up beyond the high meadows on a shelf of rock overlooking the deep valley of the Huw River, and he heard them howl most nights. Their howling was a kind of language, he realized, with different moods on different nights. When he returned from these trips into the wild he was always very quiet, seeming to fade into the woodwork at home.

Other times he would work absentmindedly in the polder. His weeding was obsessively good, but his planting had become haphazard, and his sister had to redo most of it. Planting waterbush took a particular swift hand movement to sink the stalk of the new plant into the surface of the polder to a depth of about an inch. It required a precise stroke every time, and it required concentration. Thru just didn't have that anymore, except for one place, on the game field.

Even as his parents grew worried about him, he turned to the game for a way out of his sorrow and humiliation.

Iallia no longer stood at his side after games, but that didn't matter. He closed his eyes to everything except the flight of the little white ball. His wrists moved without conscious thought, and his swing was perfect. During the stroke he floated in a quiet place that lasted for much longer than the split second in which he hammered the ball away toward the boundary.

His skill with the bat became the stuff of legends that summer. Against Juno Village he rapped out thirty-three runs and Warkeen won by ten. The Warkeen Village team won the championship of Drant County, and from that went on to reach the championship match for all Dronned. Their opponents were the great team fielded by the Laughing Fish, Dronned's most famous inn. Thru struck twenty-one runs in a tense and exacting match of skills, and Warkeen won by a single run.

The King of Dronned, Belit the Frugal, was watching from his customary place at the boundary. He handed over the Dronned trophy to Kels Geliver, the captain of the Warkeen team, and there was a long outburst of genuine applause from the crowd. The youngsters from Warkeen had played exceptionally well that day.

Afterward, the Warkeen players and friends and family were all dining at the Laughing Fish as guests of the innkeeper himself, but Thru slipped away from the celebrations. He didn't think he could make casual conversation. He just wanted to be alone.

He headed through the gate and into the city proper. Dronned was a city of grey-stone buildings, two or even three stories tall, roofed with slate and cut with long, narrow windows. The streets were cobbled and drained down the middle. Where important streets met there was usually a square, with a garden in the center. Thru slipped into one of these carefully tended gardens at the junction of Slope and Seam Streets near the river. He took a seat on a bench in a far corner and sat there thinking. Already the feelings of triumph from winning the championship of all Dronned had faded. Warkeen had played above themselves to win. Some of the catches they'd made had been amazing, and when they'd had to they'd come up with the runs. He'd struck twenty-one runs on his own, keeping them in the game; by rights he should be ecstatic. But instead, he just felt cold and empty. Without the game to fill up his thoughts he returned to a void, where all he could hear were Iallia's happy cries when she was snuggling that day with Pern.

Thru took a deep breath. He had to move on, he had to put it all behind him, but he was finding it very hard.

He was still there a few minutes later when some young mots and mors came running noisily up Seam Street and spilled into the little park. Thru was sitting tucked into one corner of the park. The newcomers gathered around the fountain in the middle, clearly in the midst of a wild revel.

Thru recognized some of them at once. There was Lem Frobin and Tugel Jixxe, who were both part of Pern's clique. Lem was waving a wineskin around, and they were both talking in loud voices. The mors were locals, Dronned mors with the fur on their heads tied up with rows of tiny ribbon bows of blue and red, a fashion of the moment in the town.

And there was Pern himself, with his arm around the waist of a young mor with very pale fur. She was unusually pretty, and clearly used to being paid attention to by males.

Thru watched as Pern snuggled openly with this young beauty. Then Lem Frobin offered the wineskin to Pern, who drank and then urged it on the young mor. They all laughed together and a little later Pern and the young mor went off into the bushes at the other end of the park.

Giggles soon erupted from their depths.

Sickened, Thru got up and left quietly, mulling it over as he walked up Slope Street. Pern didn't love Iallia the way Thru had. And, he realized with a dull sense of shock, Iallia probably didn't love Pern. What they both loved was the wealth that Pern possessed.

One day Thru would inherit a share of a polder and a part of a field. Like most young mots, he would have to earn his way through hard work and a little luck. If Iallia wed him, it would be years before she would feel comfortably well-off.

Iallia was a practical-minded mor, and she was used to a certain level of comfort in her life. Pern Treevi would be well set up by his family with at least one polder, perhaps more, and access to all the extensive family commons.

And Thru Gillo? He was handsome and wonderful to watch on the game field, but he had hardly anything to his name in the way of polder. And as everyone knew, to have polder was to be wealthy, while to have a field was simply to survive, for only in polder could one grow waterbush.

Thru trudged back to the inn and climbed the stairs to his room, ignoring the merriment going on in the main hall below. The next day he returned to Warkeen and tried to put his heart into his work on the family farm. On the polder there was always weeding to do, so he became a fanatic of the weeds. His mother praised him for his efforts, but his father could tell that Thru's heart just wasn't in it. By endsummer Thru was taking off on long walks again. He'd finish his weeding early and take his bow and a small pack and set off for Cormorant Rock or some other promontory to clear his head of the dismay and pain that seemed to fill it when he was home in the village.

At the fest of the Summer Spirit when red Kemm rode above the horizon at night, his mother, bless her, tried to get him interested in the sweet, but plain, Xinne Batir. He was friendly and polite with Xinne, but the feeling for her just didn't grow. Xinne was dutiful, but quiet, and she didn't laugh often.

Snejet knew his real heart and told him so.

"You don't want Xinne. I can see that. You must tell Mother honestly. Stop playacting for her. Stop her matchmaking. You know she can't stop trying to help you."

Thru told Ual that same evening. Xinne stopped being invited over for supper on feast days. Thru remained his silent, withdrawn self.

The chooks, who knew about affairs of the heart, having several every month, tried to help.

"That female don't return your love? Go find another female. There be plenty."

"Thank you, but you don't understand."

"Oh, but we do, we understand. Your heart got broken, and you just being slow about it mending."

"Yeah, that may be." But he didn't change.

The harvest came in quickly, and by the time the first leaves were falling everything on the polder was done for the season. Waterbush was cut, the pods harvested, and the rest of the plant set to soak in the seapond. The wheat and melons had already been harvested, while the nuts, apples, and root vegetables were still to come.

The main work of the farm went indoors as the nimble fingers of the entire family went to work on the harvested waterbush.

Waterbush was the source of many things. The shoots in the spring were abundant and highly edible. The early pods of summer and the ripe pods of autumn could both be eaten in different and tasty ways. Leaves mashed up with ripe pods and soaked in water produced bush curd, which could be dried and used right through the winter. But waterbush provided more than food. Fiber was stripped out of the soaked stems and run through a water mill. It was dried, spun into yarn, and woven into cloth, an occupation that would keep most of the older part of the population busy through the winter months. Finally, the juice extracted from the stems in the mill was then boiled down and fermented for the fizzy sap wine, a favorite drink for the snow festivals.

Seeing that his oldest son was just not recovering, Ware took him aside one evening after supper. They sat outside in the evening cool and sipped small mugs of cellar brew.

"Have you ever thought of going to Highnoth, my son?"

The mention of the northern lair of the Assenzi sent Thru's eyebrows shooting up and down.

"No, Father, but now that you mention it..."

"I think you may be the kind who would benefit from a visit with the old Assenzi. They have many things to teach us."

Thru nodded, liking the idea. Going up to the ruins of Highnoth for a year or two was a traditional remedy for young mots who became excessively restless or morose. Life among the Ancient Ones was famously austere, but always challenging.

It was agreed, therefore, and Ware wrote out a cover letter for the Assenzi that Thru was to hand them when he arrived at Highnoth.

Ual was heartbroken to see her eldest son go off alone into the wilderness. Highnoth lay two hundred miles north in the Valley of the Moon. There were roads all the way, and there were patrols against pyluk, but pyluk were crafty beasts, justly called the wood devils, and were the most feared enemy of the folk of the Land.

And yet, there were days when she wished he was gone, because having a silent depressed youth around the house was disturbing to the whole family. But no sooner would such a thought cross her mind than her maternal instincts were aroused once more and she would weep quietly until Ware came to her and took her in his arms and whispered in her ears to calm her.

Despite all the emotional confusion, Thru packed his kit, calmly, taking a few clothes, his winter cloak and gloves, his bow and a dozen shafts.

In addition, Ware pressed on him a staff, as tall as Thru and as thick as two thumbs, cut from a piece of ash and hardened by the fire. Ware had made it himself, with his usual skill with wood.

"I call this staff 'Strongwalker,' and I give it to you, my eldest and most dear son." Thru hefted Strongwalker in his hands. It was a good staff; light but strong.

"Thank you, Father."

Thru left the village before the first big storm of autumn rolled in off the ocean. Northward he took the narrow roads of the Land. Through Shellflower County and Canton Blurri he went. This part of the trip was on well-traveled roads, and he stayed in large roadside inns—sometimes in a room, sometimes bedded down in the common room, or even in the yard, depending on what was available.

After Glashoux in Blurri, by the Lake of Blue Swans, he took the less-traveled road to the northeast. Here the land was wilder. There were no cities beyond Glashoux, and the strip of cultivation was thin and soon left behind entirely. The road narrowed to a single lane, paved in only the wettest places.

Along the way he slept at small inns or in farmhouses, where the scattered mots were always glad to see a traveler and learn the latest news from the cities to the south. When he mentioned Highnoth to these folk they always nodded and whispered a prayer with a little awe in their faces.

At one small place he arrived on the Day of Sadness. There were three families living there, working the long narrow strip of polder they'd built in the valley bottom. They were a hardworking, narrow-faced folk, and they sat at the stone ring in a glum-looking clump and listened to the words of the Great Book, weeping with genuine emotion as they chanted from the "Song of the Broken Pig."

For the festival dinner they ate fried fish and pickled melon and washed it down with thin country beer. It was meager rations compared to the lavish table that Ual Gillow would set for all her relatives on the Day of Sadness, yet it filled their bellies and left them content. They sang the traditional songs of the season and asked Thru endless questions about the big towns and cities of the coast. He answered as best he could and later slept soundly on the guest pallet in the pantry.

These folk lived hard lives compared to the folk in lusher parts of the land, but still they were cheerful with what little they had. They praised the peace of lives carved out in the wilderness. He bid them farewell the next day and went on.

But the country now gave way to the foothills of the Drakensberg. The greater mountains glittered in the east. Thru went northeast to where the Valley of the Moon nestled among the feet of white-capped mountains.

The hills were afire with scarlet and yellow in the day, for the turning leaves were at their peak of beauty. At night he slept wrapped in his heavy cloak and got used to the hard ground. The stars gleamed down with chill fury. Great red Kemm was setting early in the evenings, and the nights were filled with many more stars.

The next night found him camped out on the shoulder of Mount Ulix. It was cold, so he made a small fire to heat water for tea to wash down the dried biscuit in his pack.

The tea brought a nice glow of warmth to his insides, and he huddled back inside his cloak with a blanket wrapped around his legs. The hillsides below shimmered beneath the light of the Moon. Once through the pass at Ulix he would be only another day's journey from Highnoth.

Then, from below, he heard the howl of wolves. The fur on the back of his neck rose instinctively. Something about the howls expressed a sense of warning. The wolves were telling the world to beware. The wolves knew he was in their territory, but they would not object to a traveling mot. Between mots and wolves there had always been respect. But wolves always howled when they detected pyluk in their range.