The Revenants (37 page)

Thus it was an unintentional lapse when Terascouros, one chilly morning, twitted Medlo for being a prince. It set him into a grim-faced monologue which for a time they were too shocked to try and interrupt.

‘There may be some,’ he sneered, ‘who think it enviable to be a prince. There may be some places yet in the known world where being a prince is enviable. It was not so in Rhees. Only those who shared my high rank thought it should be envied. They considered our lengthy history of great import but had not studied it sufficiently to recognize the long line of bastards, braggarts, and bullies who were our ancestors. I, on the other hand, learned of the successive centuries of dishonour from my mother’s lips. She thought it amusing to disillusion romantic youth.

‘Well, they were bastards and so was I. Nothing could alter that.’

‘Medlo, I didn’t mean to …’

‘Hush, old woman. Hear what it means to be a prince! I was a bastard, but they were also bullies and bigots, braggarts and fools, and these I resolved not to be. I made a dream for myself. In it, my father was a commoner, but noble, of true, natural nobility. I told myself he had been dazzled by my mother’s beauty, knew almost at once he had made a mistake, and then fled from her corruption. In my fantasy he did not know he had a son, would not know until the day a royal youth would favour him from the throne by saying, “Welcome, father.” Pah! I had as much chance of knowing my father as of knowing which orchard tree among a thousand dropped the apples for my pie. I outgrew that dream early. I dreamed then of one thing only, of purifying Rhees, of building a kingdom of true glory, true nobilitv.

‘What a dream for a pale, maundering, witless fool of a boy! I had outgrown any feeling of kinship for women earlier yet. My mother’s associates were not lewd or bawdy. I could have understood that, perhaps even enjoyed it. No, they were evil. Sickly, pruriently evil. They were notorious abusers of children, and I was not exempted from their attentions merely by virtue of being Mellisa’s son. They could not maim me or kill me as they had some others, however, and after I had bitten a few of them while screaming that they stank of rot – which they did – they let me alone. Since that time,’ he said between clenched teeth, ‘I’ve been tolerant of one or two of you women, but before that I could not consider them without revulsion.’

‘Your mother?’ asked Jaer. ‘Didn’t she care for you at all?’

‘Powers alone know what she felt,’ he replied, bleakly. ‘I think sometimes she did not feel at all, that her feelings were so corrupted and besotted with the drink and the senseless boredom and the filthy habits of the court that she had no feelings. I do not know why she was bored – there was wonder enough in Rhees to keep hearts beating and minds searching for a thousand years. But she was somehow cracked in the making, though it did not show on the surface. She and Pellon, her half brother, who did not think he was my father … .
tashas
. I do not think so either. He did not know how fervently I prayed he was no nearer kin to me than my mother’s half brother.

‘So, I grew without learning to care. When I learned to care at last, I did not know it until too late. Only after I had learned to know, and to trust, and then lost all – only then did I know what I had lost.

‘So when I met you, Jaer, there was something in you of Alan. Why should I try to hide it? You know it already. You I learned from the inside out, like learning an author from his book or a musician from his song. You did not seem strange to me, even when you were most strange. And when I saw what they had done to you in Murgin, then I knew what they had done to Alan and could not pretend for a time that he was either safely dead or wholly alive. You did not die! Did he? For a time, Jaer, I prayed you would die so that I could believe him dead. Then for a time, there beneath the Hill, I convinced myself once more that he was dead, but I could not hold that conviction. Now – now, there is only cold, hopeless certainty that he lives. His only hope is where you are going. My only hope is where you are going. But I am lonely….’

Jaer started to say that she, too, was lonely, but the falsity of that speaking was in her heart before the words came. ‘I am not lonely,’ she said. ‘Not anymore.’ The wonder of that reality bloomed within as a fire might flower upon dried wood, warming and consuming at once, radiant and fell. ‘I am not alone, Medlo. Never alone. I am many. A multitude.’ She saw Medlo’s eyes on her, hating her because he was not more to her than merely one of that multitude, having no more reality for her than one of her inhabitants, one of her story-people.

She saw the expression on his face, understood it. ‘You are with me, Medlo. Truly. Here, within me.’

He choked on bitter laughter. ‘What am I like, Jaer? Is it truly me you have there? Do I feel pain and laugh and sneer and die of longing for Rhees there within you? How real ami?’

Jaer, feeling that the Medlo within was more real to her than the Medlo who stood before her, did not say so. Sympathy stayed her, that and a feeling much like love. ‘Only as real as I will ever be able to know,’ she said honestly. ‘I’m sorry. I’d comfort you if I knew how.’

‘Yes. I suppose you would. Still, if we go toward death, Jaer, I still fear it. Being preserved within you, Jaer, like a fly in amber, does not comfort me at all.’

‘Forgive me, then.’

‘There is nothing to forgive. Only to understand.’

‘Try to do that, then. Your dreams may yet be fulfilled.’

Terascouros interrupted, weary of their demands upon one another. ‘Let us be on our way. He does not know from day to day what his dream may be. He dreams of living, betimes, and of dying, betimes, and of founding a new kingdom of Rhees, betimes. When one has so many dreams, it is not unlikely at least one may be fulfilled. Avoiding all possible confusion, now, that might be a worthy dream for all of us! Let us try that.’

Jaer hung her head, for a moment ashamed, though of what she could not have said. ‘Will it help avoid confusion, Teras, if I say where we are going? We go to Tchent. To the abandoned archives of Tchent, at the very edge of the Concealment.’

Terascouros eyed her keenly, without doubt but with great curiosity. ‘We have been patient, Jaer. We have not badgered you with questions, though we have felt them. Please, for our peace, tell us what it is you know, or guess at, or even have hints of. We will travel more contentedly so, and if we must die in the travel, die with better heart for it.’

‘Teras, trust you to say you would die happy if only your curiosity were satisfied. Well,
I
would not be happy at your death, no matter how satisfied you might be. What can I tell you?’

‘Tell us who you are.’

‘Oh, by the Powers, Terascouros. When I slept, people told me tales. A man would tell me of his youth, of a place, a time, of others in his life who were important to him … or perhaps not important, merely well remembered. And here, inside, somewhere, that man would begin to live, to think, after a little time to speak, to tell me stories of his own. From a few words, a pattern. From a pattern, another few words, another pattern.

‘At the Hill, Teras, you had those sharp cuts of crystal hanging in the light, breaking the light into rainbows. Yes, like that. From each telling, the person would break within me into still others, and those others into others yet, all real, all whole.

‘Each one added made it larger, not merely a little larger but much larger, so that I thought I would break and split to shed those thousand, thousand selves and that pattern of time and place. Suddenly there were connections which I had not thought of before, which no one person had ever thought of before, for no one man – no one woman – no
one
had the knowledge, the time. About Cholder. About the strangeness of numbers in Anisfale. Why traders stopped going to Sush. And why the way beyond the Concealment must be found in Tchent. And, and, and – a thousand things more. Which I do not want to know. Which I did not ask to know. Which I do not know
how
I know.’

‘Aaah.’ For a time Terascouros did not go on, thinking to herself how marvellous and how terrible, envious of anyone who could know so much, then thinking how terrible once more as she saw the face before her, a child’s face, with the eyes of an age greater than Terascouros’s own. Pity stirred within her. ‘You do not know everything?’

‘No. Not everything. I have not the whole world inside me, only much of it. There are things hidden yet. I do not know why the name of Taniel itches at me nor why Tchent is the place we must go.’

Medlo had been listening to all this with ill concealed doubt. ‘An enigma,’ he chanted to the melody of the Summoning Chant. ‘A mystery.’

‘Hush,’ Terascouros commanded him. ‘Be careful what you do with that music! You could do more than you plan to do, more than would be comfortable. There are listeners abroad in the world.’

Medlo fell silent. Jaer and Terascouros turned away. For a time the three felt uncomfortable with one another, as though too much had been said, or too little. Kelner had perched quietly on one of the saddles during the long day, but now he fixed Jaer with an imperious yellow eye which almost seemed to spin like a wheel of fire. Jaer put out her hand, blindly, and the bird rubbed its head on her palm before clattering wings into flight. Unlike all previous times, he did not return. Jaer kept remembering the glare of those yellow eyes, the feel of feathers pressed into her palm, found herself searching the sky. But it was as empty as her heart.

The River Del led before them, the mountains loomed at their shoulders, the days went on. They grew lazy, less watchful, and Jaer did not see the swarming forms among the grasses until one had seized her pony’s leg with curved fangs and another leapt from the concealing foliage at her throat. Medlo cut it out of the air, the blade slashing before Jaer’s face, and the creature fell headless. Jaer accounted for the one which had attacked the pony, but it was too late. The poisoned fangs had done their work, and though Jaer dismounted at once to lead the beast throughout the day, by nightfall it was stumbling and blind.

‘Voasoirs,’ said Terascouros. ‘They hunt in packs in these grasslands of the east, particularly, it is said, at the edge of the Concealment.’

‘We will approach it more slowly now,’ commented Medlo, ‘with only two ponies among us. Can you sing us safe from them, Teras?’

‘If I did not need to sleep,’ she said in a dry voice. ‘But I have not found a way to do that.’

‘We will build larger fires,’ said Jaer, ‘and watch as we always do, throughout the night.’

In the morning the pony was dead, nothing left but picked bones. They had not heard the scavengers in the night, and they had uneasy thoughts about creatures so voracious and so silent.

And yet, not all creatures of the plain were prey of the hunters. As the sun rose high that morning they came upon a herd of horses, one of which came to them, whickering gently and tossing his head. It was a stallion, black hide gleaming like Kelner’s black feathers, with the same feel to it when he laid that massive head along Jaer’s face. The horse had yellow eyes, unhorselike eyes, fixed on Jaer’s own in mixed sympathy and encouragement. Jaer put her arms around the arching neck and leaned there for a moment, for that moment lost in a kind of content. The horse did not flinch when Jaer saddled him, but would not accept the bit. They went on, Jaer riding high above the shorter ponies, clutching the strange horse’s mane instead of reins, the herd neighing behind them but making no attempt to follow. ‘Who are you?’ Jaer whispered into the horse’s ear. ‘Will you tell me who you are?’ The horse only stamped a foot sharply, shook his head, and walked on.

The land sloped upward gradually, and they crossed the Del before the river banks rose to enclose it in the gorge which they would not be able to cross. Jaer fell into abstracted talk with her inhabitants, conscious of a structure which was growing within her, a twisting strangeness, as perfectly accessible as a maze garden, yet more tortuous and complex. It was growing. She could detect the pattern, could follow a
lint
of it here, there, but it seemed to have no edges. She followed the structure to the place it should end only to find that it went on, curving oddly as into some other place or time. ‘What?’ she asked the multitude within. There was a clamour, but she could not understand what it was they said.

That night, out of a depth of dream, Jaer saw herself in a caverned room lit with green lights. He heard the flutter and gasp of unliving things which glittered and spun. There was something he had to do, to find, but he awakened too suddenly. Something passed around them, something horrid, stealthy and huge out of the east, the air sizzling in its passage, the grasses recoiling as it thrust into the west.

He knew that both Terascouros and Medlo were awake. They listened for any sound which might signal a physical body moving in the wild, following whatever-it-was. Breath burst from lungs revelling at not breathing.

‘Ah, Teras,’ he said. ‘You were right. There are listeners in the world. Or watchers. Or both. And it comes close, far too close.’

Whatever-it-was did not seek them again, or they did not feel the search. In a few days’ time they came to Tchent.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

TCHENT

Days 14-16,

Month of Wings Returning

It was a city which had given up all pretence as habitation, a city remade as sculpture in which the forces of wind and sand, bird, beast and flower had operated, resisting here, giving way there, until what remained was neither natural nor intentional but an amalgam of both which was greater than either. Medlo thought the word ‘romantic,’ while Terascouros brooded over ritual words which, while more esoteric, meant the same thing.

Jaer thought no words at all. Within him the hosts of himself, changed by his change, began a slow dance of recognition and identification. What he saw was not the static vision of the ruined city but flashing images of the city as it had been envisioned, built, ruined, rebuilt and ruined yet further by the slow passage of years.