The Revenants (16 page)

‘And I seek the Girdle of Chu-Namu,’ said Jasmine, firmly, forgetting to be old and ignoring their startled glances. ‘I do seek it, purposefully. It is not casual at all….’

‘Wa’osu,’ breathed Thewson. ‘I too seek a thing, a Crown of Wisdom which belonged to the old chiefs of the Courts of the Lions. It is a place so far you do not know of it.’

‘Where all men are warriors, strong as lions,’ sang Medlo.

Thewson lifted his brows. ‘True, tune twister. And where such as you are set to gathering flowers.’

Jaer frowned, but Medlo only shrugged in disdain. ‘So I was, warrior. I gathered flowers, and gathered scorn, and gathered evil intentions, and left them all at last to gather dust upon the road, as do we all. Still, you eat food which my songs have earned, and your spear may keep us alive until we eat again. If we can get under cover.’

They bought a room, locked themselves inside, and divided the night into watches. Leona took the first, Thewson the second. Jaer drifted to sleep lulled by the breathing of the great dogs which lay beside him.

Jaer dreamed. Someone said, ‘Is she a virgin?’ and she was walking among strangers dressed in filmy white with the little pink snouts of her breasts peeking out to see where they were going. Medlo, elegant in green velvet, answered, ‘Yes, she is. Oh, yes. Always.’

Someone said there had been no harvest because there had been no unicorn, no unicorn because there had been no virgin. Jaer shook her long, yellow hair over her shoulders and tried to look remote. She was sitting on a large, sharp rock which was biting its way into her left buttock with sullen fervor. The rock was in a clearing. Concentration was difficult, but Jaer knew that the solemnity of the occasion demanded ritual, motionless purity.

‘Just the one we’ve been looking for,’ said someone. The unicorn at the edge of the clearing tossed its glittering mane in a veil of frost as it turned to get another look at her.

‘I have a sense of technical impropriety,’ said the unicorn in Ephraim’s old voice. Jaer muttered something, and the unicorn went on, ‘What was that? I wish you’d speak up. I hate virgins who won’t speak up.’

‘I said, you’re not the only one. I’ve had a sense of technical impropriety ever since I was born.’

‘I’ve met a lot of you virgins,’ said the unicorn. ‘Well, a lot of nonvirgins, too, if it comes to that. I’ve never had quite this feeling before.’

‘A kind of itch,’ suggested Jaer. ‘Mixed with a little spontaneous and irresolute anger.’

‘Rather like that,’ mused the unicorn.

‘Perhaps if I explained it to you …’

‘I’m not sure I want to know about it,’ said the unicorn, kicking moodily at a rotted stump. Large hunks of punky wood began to fly about the clearing. ‘Still, I need to know whether to go on with this or not.’

‘I was born with a genetic defect,’ said Jaer. In the dream this seemed entirely reasonable. ‘Sometimes I’m male, and sometimes I’m female. I switch. Technically, each new body may be a virgin. I suppose it is. Do you follow me?’

‘I wouldn’t follow that if it were in season,’ complained the unicorn. ‘I’m appalled at the idea. Great Mythos, why did this happen to me? Why not one of the colts who are always complaining about the status quo anyway?’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose to get staked out here in this damp clearing. It was Medlo, and the people of yon village.’

‘I wish the people of yon village would leave me alone. They twiddle on pipes and pound on drums and drag their stupid daughters out here in flocks expecting me to cuddle up to the coldest, vinegary smelling ones. I do it, to keep peace, but I don’t like it. What am I supposed to do about you?’

‘They have sent me to avert a famine. If a unicorn is led through the village, there will be no famine.’

‘A famine! I never heatd of anything so ridiculous.’

‘Well, they haven’t been able to catch you for several years, and there’s been famine for several years.’

‘They’ve been lolling about the tavern for several years,’ said the unicorn. ‘They haven’t put a plow to the fields.’

‘Famine was inevitable without a unicorn,’ said Medlo, who had joined her in the clearing. ‘So they didn’t bother.’

‘I won’t do it.’ He snorted. ‘I won’t, that’s all. I’m too old and fragile. Besides, the gryphon at the edge of the clearing won’t allow it. Gryphons frighten me….’

The gryphon was there, enormous and very terrible, its beak wide as the tongue vibrated a brazen cry. ‘Jaer, Jaer get away. They are coming for you. They have come suddenly and they will find you here. Get away.’

In the dream, Jaer thought that she should be frightened of the gryphon. Its wings were sharpened knives of steel and its feathers swords of brass. Its beak was a hooked eater of souls, and its awesome talons were renders of the lost. But Jaer was not afraid of the gryphon, only horribly, horribly afraid of the other thing which was coming. The unicorn screamed, and fled to the sound of its own screaming….

Jaer woke to the sound of screaming from the yard outside the door. Leona had seized the dogs. ‘They say danger, terror, pain. There is no window here. We are trapped.’

Thewson spoke from the corner. ‘No. I will not stay in a place which is a trap. There is loose thatch here where the beam is. Above this is a roof. We can go up.’

‘Quickly then.’ Leona thrust her pack together and went up Thewson’s crouched body as though he were a stair. She shoved the thatch aside and pushed through, calling the dogs after her. Thewson grimaced as their claws raked his shoulders. Medlo had shaken Jasmine awake, thrust a pack at Jaer, rolled his own things together. The noise in the courtyard grew louder, more agonized. The scream which had been few voices became many.

Thewson came up last, lifting himself with bulging arms. They crouched while he rearranged the thatch to cover the hole, then slithered along the ridge to the neighbouring roof, higher and flat, speared through with stove-pipes and fogged with smoke and the smell of sausages. Medlo lay below the parapet, mumbling, ‘Did we leave that door locked from the inside? If they search rooms, they’ll know no one went out the door….’

Thewson rumbled, ‘I unlocked it, flower picker. We who sell-spear learn to leave false trails.’

‘They have dogs.’

Leona shushed him. ‘No dog can smell its way through air. Our stairway came through the roof with us. What makes them scream so?’

Medlo whispered from his position at the parapet. ‘There are robed ones there, torturing some others. They have knives…. ‘He gagged and put his head down on his arms. They lay like lumps on the roof, even the dogs stretched flat, hidden behind the parapet and the lowering smoke. They could hear voices from the echoing courtyard below.

‘We want a girl, young, yellow-haired. She may be with a pale man. Possibly they are oddly dressed. If you have seen such, you will tell us.’ They could not hear answers, only panting, moaning, someone mumbling,’… women in there …’

Beneath them the door to the room they had left was flung wide, striking the wall with a splintering crash. An oily, obsequious voice said, ‘Empty, Lord Lithos. No one here…’

And another voice, cold as winter midnight and as dark. ‘This is the room women were said to occupy? Bring the dogs.’

Then came scuffling, low growling, more scuffling and yelps of pain or fear and the sound of a whip being applied with more yelping woven into it.

‘What ails them?’

‘They are frightened, Lord Protector. Something they smell frightens them.’

‘Well it might. Do they scent those who were here?’

‘I think so, Lord Protector.’

‘Then make a circuit of the walls. Find the way they have gone, then follow them.’

Leona rolled over to fumble beneath her robes for a moment, drawing out some article of clothing which she fastened to the dog, Mimo’s collar. She whispered urgently to Thewson who lifted the dog over the edge of the roof, lowering him to the ground in one, fluid motion before recoiling back onto the roof. Instantly the dog ran off into the darkness, the fabric tied to his collar dragging upon the ground. They lay silent, listening to the men and dogs who came to the place Mimo had touched, then moved off into the darkness the way Mimo had gone.

‘Will they catch him?’ Jasmine whispered. ‘Hurt him?’

Leona patted her briefly. ‘He is not likely to be caught. After a time he will tear the cloth away and return to find our trail, a trail we must make swiftly, before the men return.’ She took a small vial from her pack, stretched to anoint Thewson’s feet with the contents, then her own, then the others. They squirmed over the wall, dropping soundlessly at its foot to flee into the night. They went upward and eastward, pausing at the crest of a hill while Thewson and Leona conferred. ‘We cannot go west, for that would take us back through the city. North are the broken lands, a fool’s journey. South is the desert, and we carry nothing for such a trip. We are paid to go east, and east is open to us. We go there.’

A long, rocky slope led downward to the eastern roadway from Byssa, and they paralleled this road for several miles, scrambling over the rough land. At length they stopped to rest in a stony hollow above the road, and the bitch, Werem, whined as Mimo came trotting up to them, tongue hanging and teeth shining in the starlight. ‘He is trained to follow the stuff on the feet?’ asked Thewson.

Leona nodded. ‘But the dogs the priests have are not trained to follow it. They will only whine and be beaten. They will not follow us.’

‘Why would they follow us anyhow?’ demanded Jasmine. ‘They must be looking for someone else. We just got caught in the middle. Pm not even sure why we ran away.’

‘Because from that city, from those people, the only wise thing to do is run,’ said Me-lo sombrely. ‘No matter who, or what they are looking for.’

‘They spoke of a girl,’ said Leona. ‘With a pale man, oddly dressed …’ Jaer caught at these words. They were like something seen recently, something known. Knees trembling, Jaer sat down upon the rock, head between knees.

‘A girl,’ said Medlo. ‘There have been several strange things connected with girls … or with becoming a girl.’ He thrust the hood away from Jaer’s head and tilted her chin up toward the stars. ‘As you have done.’

The others drew close to see Jaer’s face, girlish and fair, framed by a tangle of golden hair. Even as Leona and Thewson stared, Jaer thought it odd that they did not seem incredulous as Medlo had been, not as curious as Jasmine. Instead, they simply glanced at one another, and Thewson rumbled, ‘Wa’osa, wa’os, wa’osu.’

‘You believe this?’ demanded Medlo. ‘Just like that?’

Leona stared at him, or through him, her nostrils flaring in some emotion he could not identify. ‘It is written,’ she said, ‘that the Northlord, Sud-Akwith, sought to rebuild Tharliezalor beside the far sea, and that demons came from beneath the city to his ruin. I cannot say it is so, yet it is written. It is written that the ruins of the City of the Mists lie beyond the Concealment, empty now, for the Lady’s priestesses have fled long ago in the Second Age. I have not seen it. Both of these things are riddles and mysteries. Shall I believe them and not this? Or this and not them? Am I credulous? Or do I merely wait to see what thing comes from dreams to threaten this person as the demons came from beneath Tharliezalor to threaten the Northking-dom?’

Thewson rumbled, ‘Fanuluzh lorn nunuluzh. As it is said among my people, “Of the gods, or of newness.” Both are strange.’

The two looked at one another, Leona ghost pale, Thewson night dark, as though they shared deep thoughts. Medlo could not imagine what they shared to ally them in this fashion.

Leona turned away at last. ‘It is at least a different thing from the little towns with their hating gates and the harsh cities with their forbidding walls, a different thing from little people all alike in their tiny differences.

‘Well, we have taken your coin in return for guarding you through the canyon of the Del.

‘The journey is before us. Let us go.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE RIVER DEL

Year 1168-Winter

The dawn showed them riven land heaped from the banks of the river, piled away on either side to the base of the shadowy cliffs, blue and hazy in the early light. As they went east the cliffs marched inward, ever darker and more ominous, until at last they became a looming wall broken only by the dark doorway of the canyon, scarcely wider than the River Del which rushed from it in an ebon flow. They slept that night in a scanty copse of starved-looking trees which held the last of the day’s light near the entrance to the canyon. During the day Jaer had felt the carefully incurious glances from Thewson and Leona, the blandly quiet stares, nothing offensive, nothing she could resent. And yet there was a pressure in those looks unlike the swift kin-longing, skin-longing looks from Medlo and Jasmine. Jaer felt it as a subtle disquiet and welcomed sleep as a relief from the tension of it.

In the night Jaer changed, this time without remembering a dream or searching voice. His form might almost have been a twin to the girl of yesterday, still fair and slender but with a stronger chin and more breadth across the shoulders. Leona examined him as they ate, eyes still bland but slightly puzzled, as though she discarded one thought and sought another.

Medlo was a little less forcedly jocular, again calling him ‘youngun.’ Jasmine merely looked at him and sighed.

They started early, plunging into the narrow way between rock walls echoing with the river’s murmur. At either side the walls stepped upward, pillar upon pillar, all peering down rocky noses under shaggy brows of juniper, frowning over the stony sockets of the cliff. Something watched them. Small slides of gravel whispered down the walls to speak of hidden movement high along the cliffs. Leona and Thewson studied every shadow, their faces grim, and the shaggy hounds quirked brindle foreheads to glare upward with watchful amber eyes. The road turned again and again, into the sun and out of it, down long halls of shade and into sunlit passages once more. Crooked side canyons clambered back into the broken land, narrowing as they went, winding behind spires of stone and low, black clumps of needled growth. Moisture sneaked down some of these side ways, oozing from stone to stone, leaving a fleeting smell of wet and moss. The wind snarled continuously, and the feel of eyes upon them never left them.