The Saga of the Renunciates (83 page)

Damn, I can see where on a planet like this
, laran
would be a simple survival skill
. The thought did not seem like her own and she wondered where she had picked it up.

It was pointless to sit there, exposed in the height of the pass. She urged her horse round, sympathizing, with a pat on the neck, to the complaining beast as it faced reluctantly into the storm, and started down the slope. The road was uneven and rutted, rain washing from the heights, leaving only heavy stones and gravel under foot; even at this height most of the snow was melted, and she could smell curious flowery scents and little stings of resin and pollen in the air; the height of summer, flowers and buds everywhere rioting swiftly in the short hill-country summer. When the sun rose she would see flowers everywhere, she supposed, in the brief budding and fruiting season. An image from somewhere swept her mind, a slope covered with blue flowers and drifting golden pollen; something, perhaps, that she had seen on her travels with Peter, when they were in the field together? There was something she ought to remember about that. Well, it would come to her, no doubt.

Could she possibly press on through the night? She had had but little sleep the night before. But her horse was fresh, and for a time at least, since Jaelle was at least two hours ahead of her, she could drowse in the saddle, there was certainly no likelihood that she would pass her in the darkness. Jaelle would never try to set up camp on a steep slope like this. The rushing of water down the hillsides, to valley streams noisy with the swelling rain, was loud in her ears, and the uneven steps of her mount’s hooves on the descending road. Not even Alessandro Li would have considered this a main road. Would he have realized it and turned back? No, for if he had, she or Jaelle would have met him—there was certainly, in this high trail, no place to get off the road, and it was barely wide enough for two on horseback to ride abreast. Her hood protected her face from rain, and she was warmly clad, but enough of the wind got under the hood to make her shiver and it took all her attention to stay in the saddle as the protesting animal carefully picked its way among the ruts of the trail.

A gap in the blowing clouds cast fitful light over the trail, and she gasped, pulling her beast against the cliff; normally she was not afraid of heights, but here the road, narrowing to a path, hugged the cliff and water cascaded off the trail in two places where the edge had been carried away by erosion or landslide. Well, both the man and the woman before her had passed this point; there would have been some sign if anyone had stumbled over the cliff in the ailing light. Abruptly cloud covered the moon again and she was left in darkness. Dark or light, this was not a good place to stay; with the rain still pouring, and water rushing down in ruts beside the trail, there could be another landslide. She would have preferred to dismount and lead her horse down the narrowing trail, but there was no place to get off and so she was committed to trust the beast’s feet as it edged on, snorting a little.

“Your opinion of this place is just about like mine, fellow,” she said softly. “Let’s get along out of it. But take your time, old boy. Careful.” And in a few minutes they were again safely within a darkness where both sides of the trail rose safely between heavy masses of trees. Again somewhere in the forest she heard some night beast, but she was less afraid of them than of the dreadfully exposed cliff trail which might open up again before her.

They have passed it. I can too, if I must
, Magda thought, but while she was under the trees her breath came easier. Really, she should dismount here and wait till daylight. Li was not likely to travel in a strange world in the total dark—she thought he came from one of the planets with brighter suns and he would find this even darker than she did, who had lived here since childhood— and he had after all passed this way some hours even before Jaelle and would have reached the comparative safety of the valley floor and camped there for the night; surely they would come up with him in the morning.

And still the rain cascaded on, flooding down from the heights, pouring in every little rut it could find, toward the valley. Most of the winter’s snow must be melting on the slopes, for the rain was warm; she could already see the damage flood had done on the track and on the hillside, and once or twice she had to pick her way around a tree which had fallen during the winter storms and lay blocking the path. If a tree should come down across any point where the trail narrows against the mountainside, there would be no passage at all…

Well, she would, literally, cross that bridge when she reached it. For the moment the trail was safe enough; she felt even the muscles in her scalp relaxing, and her conscious mind caught up with the subconscious enough to realize that she had passed the worst.

No need even to hypothesize
laran
, she told herself logically; the sound of water, wind and erosion, the subliminal cues in the way my horse behaves. That’s all it is. Unconscious logic below the conscious threshold. I wonder how much
laran
is this subliminal adding up of unconscious cues?

It doesn’t matter what it is. It probably saved my life on that damnable cliff!

She reached inside her cloak for a hunk of bread and another mouthful of dried fruit, and chewed on it. The rain blew crosswind in many places, sometimes soaking a mouthful of the bread before she could get it from fingers to mouth. Just like a man, she thought crossly, to take off into a storm; a woman would have had the sense to look at the weather and wait till it cleared.

Li could not have been expected to know what Darkoven weather was like, and after the winter snows, it must have seemed mild to him.
But he could have had the sense to ask Jaelle. That was what she was there for
!

When Jaelle woke it was still raining. Fortunately she had managed to get over the pass, and down along the worst of the trail, before the light had faded. She could not imagine why Li had not continued on the Great North road at least as far as Mali, then turned west. But at least it was past. She did not want to think about what it would have been like to come down that eroded, water-washed cliff trail in the darkness.

Now, even through the rain, she felt a faint smell that tickled her nose. She had not smelled it for a long time, but no one who had ever smelled the
kireseth
flower could mistake the scent. She had no wish to ride through the rain, but it was better than ripening
kireseth
pollen, scattered by the wind.

It was early, but if she got on the road as quickly as she could, she would catch up to Li all the sooner. So far there was no danger which a reasonably good rider could not have avoided, and against all reason she clung to the belief that if harm had already come to him on the trail she would know it.

The rain was definitely slowing. Jaelle groaned and rolled out of her sleeping bag, hauling on her boots. She spread the bag on her saddle—rolling it wet would only cause it to mildew—and wished there were some way to coax a fire. A hot drink would feel very good just now, but there was no way to get it. She sniffed the dried fruit, and shrugged, thrusting it back into the saddlebag.

The ranchers out this way, usually small-holders whose main crop were the scrubby ponies or woollies, tried to keep the
kireseth
clear. But even this close to Thendara, there was a lot of wild, untraveled country, and in such sparsely settled places, there was no way to tell what might have been there. At one time during the night past, she was sure she had heard the cry of one of the catlike predators, hunting, and shivered. In years of traveling she had never met one face to face. But she was afraid of them.

The mist from the damp ground was blowing away in wisps on the erratic breeze. Jaelle swung herself into the branches of a low-growing tree, and climbed a few feet higher, looking across the valley as far as she could. No sign of Li. But he must be somewhere on this road. There was no place to turn off the cliff road, so he must have come down here, and set off across country. If she rode hard, she would surely come up with him in a few hours. There was still another mountain to cross before they reached the edge of the vast Alton lands, and another valley; a bad one, with ravines into which, she supposed, Carr’s plane had gone down years before. She didn’t suppose Li had come out to have a look at the wreckage of the plane, but she was no longer sure of anything a Terran might do.

She climbed down and into her saddle. She set off at a steady trot that ate up distance, and before the sun was well above the cloud layer she was climbing the steep path at the far side of the valley. Halfway up the mountainside she looked back, out over the valley. For a moment between the trees she thought she caught a sign of a solitary figure on horseback but then it was gone into the greenery again. All around her in the warmth of the day flowers were blooming, taking advantage of the short season; as she rode up the trail her nostrils were filled with their scent and her eyes with their color. Why, she was free again, did it truly matter what she had left behind her?

Piedro… perhaps he was not dead after all but only stunned. She must believe that. If he was dead… if he was dead, why, then, she had murdered him… but she would not let herself think about that. Not now. It was her duty to find Aleki in this wilderness, to come up with him and escort him to Armida.

She rode swiftly as her pony could carry her, her eyes bent on the trail to spot any signs that a rider had passed this way, or camped anywhere along here. Her eyes were sharp and she had been trained in tracking; halfway up the side of the mountain she spotted crushed ferns where someone had tethered a horse, a small cooling pile of horse manure, the scrap of paper which once had wrapped some Terran ration packs. Aleki had come this way, then. She had not wasted her time on this dreadful trail while Aleki went off in some other direction. He had passed this way at least three hours before, but she was gaining on him. Surely she would come up with him before nightfall.

The trail narrowed near the top again, and once again the edges of the path were worn away by water and erosion; rills of water were still taking every available rut down the mountainside, rushing down alongside the trail, taking short cuts down from worn-away dirt between the rocks. Branches of trees had come down during the storm and once or twice she had to dismount and lead her pony carefully around them. The sun was warm, and Jaelle was grateful, for her damp clothes were drying and steaming on her back, but still, at the back of her nose she seemed to smell the ominous haze of
kireseth
pollen. She had been warned about it; under its influence, men and beasts, she was told, went mad, attacked; animals rushed about madly or coupled out of season. She had been told other stories of its influence too. Well, she could not imagine that it would have enough of an effect on her that she would tear off Alessandro Li’s clothes and attack him! The idea made her laugh. She was glad to have something to laugh about.

Now she began to descend into the valley. From the top of the trail she thought, again, that she saw a rider.
Peter is dead. They have sent someone to track down his murderer, bring me back to justice
. The smell of the
kireseth
was thick now in her nostrils, and she realized that her head felt muddled. Maybe she had not seen a rider trailing her, she could not see it now, maybe she had hallucinated the whole thing. Now she
knew
her mind was going, for somewhere it seemed that she could hear Magda’s voice calling her name.

Jaelle! Breda
! But the voice was all in her mind. Magda, thanks to the Goddess, was safe in the Guild House. She had destroyed everything else but she had not,
this
time, dragged Magda into her troubles, or involved Magda in Peter’s murder.

None of this would have happened if I had not stopped to fight with Peter. I should have ignored him and done my duty as an Amazon would do it, without worrying about any man, any lover. Then I would have gone with Li, I would not be trailing him on this godforgotten road!

Her thinking was far too muddled. She had better do something about the smell of the
kireseth
. She pulled off her neckerchief and dipped it in the little stream that rushed down alongside the road, then tied it across her face. It would filter out the worst of the pollen. It was uncomfortable, blocking her breathing and clogging her breath, but after half an hour or so she could see a fine layer of yellow grains on the kerchief; so it was filtering out some of the stuff. But what about Li? Had anyone bothered to warn him about the
kireseth
in the hills? What shape was he in?

A rabbithorn loped across the road, leaping high into the air and twisting to land and scoot between her horse’s legs. A
rabbithorn
? Normally they would hide in the shrubbery, and never venture out—but she was already fighting her horse, who was rearing up and plunging so hard that she had to cling to its back to keep from sliding off. She tried to quiet the frantic animal, noticing with the edges of her mind that the rabbithorn who had caused all the trouble was sitting quietly at the side of the road. It made no sense at all. She had never seen any wild animal behave like that!

It must be the pollen. Not a true Ghost wind, perhaps. But enough of the stuff to affect the animals. The rabbithorn was gone. How long had she been sitting there in the saddle, staring at the sky? She pulled off the mask and wet it again. It was caked with the yellow stuff. What had it done to her horse? For that matter, how would it affect Li’s horse? She did not even know if he had bought a seasoned mountain animal, or one that would bolt at the first whiff of the stuff!

The road forked, and her horse came to a halt, bending its head to crop at the green grass in the triangle formed by the roads. She got down to look for water to wet the mask, and look at the marks in the mud. Which way had Li gone?

She had tarnished her oath so many times. But at least this duty was clear. She had made herself personally responsible for this man. His safety had to be her first priority.

What would the
kireseth
do to her child
? She tried frantically to recall midwives’ lectures in the Guild House. They had warned about certain medicines and herbs which could damage even the child in the womb, but she had been so sure she would never want a child, she had only half listened. She looked at the roads ahead. This one must run over the peaks to the South, winding up at Edelweiss, though it was not a direct route. There were farmers living out there, and one or two little villages, and a fulling-mill where cloth was gathered in from cottage weavers who dwelt in little hillside crofts and spun and wove coarse cloth from their own woollies, dyeing it with herbs for the ancient tartan patterns. This road, when it was clear of snow, must lead by twisting hill paths to Armida, and if Li had studied the map and had a good direction-finder, this was the road he should have taken. Leading off to one side of this was a cattle trail, heavily beaten out and flat with chervine hoofs. Li would never have taken this one. She swung into the saddle again and started down the road to Armida. Surely now she would come up with Alessandro Li in less than an hour. He must be on this road. She settled her horse into a canter, but something nagged at her mind.

The width and flatness of the cattle trail. Beaten out flat and broad by hoofs. Could Li have thought this was the road? Just because it
was
broad and flat and beaten smooth…

No. Surely he would have seen the hoof marks and recognized it for what it was. He would have known that nothing on less than four feet had passed that way in at least a tenday.

Or would he
? She stopped, pulling on the reins, swinging the animal around. A sharp hallucinatory pattern burst into her mind in the midst of brilliant colors; Aleki, sprawled across the trail insensible…

She must go back and at least check the cattle trail for marks of a solitary horseman passing. Damn the man! Hadn’t he sense enough to stay on what was clearly a road? But in the past months, among Terrans, Jaelle had seen many pictures and could now—sometimes—get a flash of what the world looked like through a Terran’s eyes. As she looked at the beaten-flat cattle trail, it began to look more and more to her like a main road— more like a road than the two small narrow roads which led off to the other sides. The cattle trail led nowhere, only back into endless, bottomless ravines into which nothing could go but the surefooted chervines, into canyons and wide open spaces. But to Aleki it would have looked like a man-made, artificially smoothed road.

Surely they would have warned him in Thendara. But, no. He had probably looked at the aerial map and traced a straight cross-country route to Armida, and it might have seemed to him that this was the road. And if he had breathed enough of the
kireseth
pollen, he might even have
seen
it as a road.

Hallucinated it even, as a Terran-style paved road.

Now she was all but sure. She steered the mount on to the trail. The pony whickered, distrusting the smell of chervines, and she had to urge it on, down into the broken country, used only in summer to pasture chervines and similar cattle. There must be wild range herds out here, checked only once or twice a year, and cropped now and then for skins or for meat. There were always lush valleys tucked away in this kind of country, though she had never seen this particular stretch before, and there was certainly an inaccessible valley somewhere where the
kireseth
blossomed year by year, undisturbed. The sun was hot on her back, and the light dazzled, flickers of mirage along the trail, like spilled water. It would be all too easy to lose yourself in this country and never get out.

A solitary horseman must have passed this way, not long ago. She hallucinated a brilliantly colored picture, like a small video on one of the security monitors inside the Headquarters, of Aleki, his tall lean figure wrapped in a bright blue parka, his hair blown around his head, leaning over the back of his horse in the rain. He could not now be very far ahead of her on the trail. But it was quickly replaced with an even more brilliant little picture on the inside of her eyelids, Aleki sprawled lifeless
(Like Peter! Like Peter lying dead inside the HQ!)
arms and legs flung wide, his head lolling against a stone while at his side the horse lazily cropped tufts of grass. What to believe? And now she could hear Magda again.

She had better dampen the scarf. Her head felt fuzzy and the air shimmered. Picture succeeded picture, Aleki climbing a steep trail on foot, and for a moment sprawled half naked beneath a strange spiky tree like nothing that had ever grown or ever would grow on Darkover, beside the shores of a strange lake with the tree bending over him and moving in an invisible wind. He was naked, erect, and he reached out for her with an immediacy which made Jaelle start and blink and the picture was gone,
Aleki
? Never! Surely it was the fault of the pollen, or had she picked up some random erotic image from his mind or memory? That meant he must be quite near. But she found that her palms felt sweaty and her heart pounded with something like panic. She had never had the slightest sexual awareness of Alessandro Li, would have said she could never have had, and the fact that she had been capable of seeing that kind of mental picture, even if it was pure hallucination, terrified her. It was not hers. She would not own to it even as a vision.

She rode for more than an hour along the trail, which slowly narrowed, and suddenly divided into six or eight narrow paths, running in every direction down into little ravines.

If Aleki had come along here, surely he would have realized that this was a dead end, that it was not a road at all. Surely his judgment would lead him to turn back.
If he still had any judgment after hours of exposure to
kireseth. He must be lying down there somewhere, dead or incapacitated, or—she remembered the sudden, erotic force of the hallucination—wildly intoxicated with
kireseth
and not knowing what had happened to him. Had anyone warned him about scorpion-ants or greenface leaves? Certainly not. She had believed that she would be with him, to guide his first essay into the field, and had relied on that. She had made herself personally responsible for him. And now she was forsworn again.