Red Country (9 page)

Tirien Neth delighted me, a sinuous watercourse of pools and patchy grass and white sand brilliant under huge Stiriand helliens, the first sizeable trees since Eskan Helken. Their black-and-white dappled bark and heavy shadow seemed beautifully cool, and the general beauty was scarcely marred by a barrage dam which fed irrigation channels to the dassyk we had just left.

After we pitched camp I wandered upstream, hopeful of more Hethrian gweldryx, whose colors, if not their truly terrible squawks, were a lasting joy to me. I noted an ant-bed eaten out by a spiny-backed helymfet, and was heralded by flocks of cerisval that whirled from my path like flying gray-tipped apple buds. Then a clamor like a dozen squeaky doors swung at once jerked my eyes to the trees.

I was under a hellien with a hollow branch, where some cerisval had made a nest. Both parents were there, flapping and screeching in the wildest agitation. I stared, baffled. Then along the branch, a sheet of bark came to life.

It was a langu, one of the big black desert pythons, ten feet long, thick as a man's forearm. It was climbing with its slow, inexorable, terrifying snake's glide toward the nest.

One jump had me in the riverbed, scooping stones. Childhood has given me a good throwing arm and I used it to the utmost, sending a volley of pebbles into the tree. But the langu was beyond my range, all I managed was to scare the birds from their pathetic defense. Quite unaware that it was only with my mind, I screamed in grief and fury,
Zam, come here, quick! Quick!

Of course he did not shout, What is it? Nor did he come pelting to my aid. The Arts are swift as other thought. Though he answered on my next breath he must already have used farsight to perceive the situation and decided his response.

His mental voice was cool as his spoken one. He said,

My rage and refusal never attained to thought. I swooped on another stone, and my hand stopped in mid-snatch.

As I struggled in superstitious terror and good honest wrath, he repeated, with a hint of iron,

I fought. And to my utter outrage found myself, mentally kicking and bawling like a leashed lap-dog, turned about and walking back to the camp.

In that short distance I expended every obscenity in my vocabulary, reached hitherto unscaled heights of invective, poured verbal—or at least mental—boiling oil and scorpions on his head. I arrived ready to stab, stone, strangle or burn him alive, and would have settled for dismemberment, given the opportunity.

I did not get it. He was standing by the saddlebags, his stance curiously rigid, those gray eyes shimmering like molten lead. I was still ten feet away when he said, “You may as well know now, you can't. When you're calmer, I'll explain. Until then, for both our sakes, you'd best stay where you are.”

And my feet seemed to take root in the ground.

However demeaning a tantrum may be, especially for one taught to vanquish emotion, I defy anyone, in such a position, to be less than beside themselves. It was Chake, of course. The aedryx' direct Command. Had I known the name, it would have been no better. My self-control was gone beyond recapture. I simply had to wait for the fury to burn itself out.

He lit the fire, proceeding stolidly with routine. It took me till dusk to swallow that; but at last I achieved a cold, hate-filled calm in which I recollected my rank and resolved to stand on it. No shrieks, assaults, shrewish tirades would mar my majestic dignity. I would be as cold as Hazghend's icebergs, and twice as blighting as ice.

Instantly my limbs were released. Knees trembling, I walked forward and let myself sink down by the flames.

Another of aedryx' maddening habits is their ability to nip your gambits in the bud. He did not give me the pleasure of refusing food or drink. Nor did he apologize. He said in his calm, impervious voice, “Spiders paralyze flies and hang them up alive. Hornets store living insects for their larvae to eat. Mantis females bite off their lovers' heads. Ulfann packs pull calves' intestines out before they're dead. Morvallin pick out lambs' eyes on the wing. And kings kill and maim their subjects—so they can win a war.”

My dignity forbade avengement of this last comparison, though I took the point of the parallels all too well.

He went on quietly, “If you had chased it away, it would only have found something else. That's how it lives. Even in Hethria, we have no right to favor one living thing above another because we like them better. They are all part of reality. That-which-is. Some parts may be harder to accept than others, but all are equally real. I thought you made a point of facing facts?”

I had just control enough to turn a shoulder and say in the iciest tone achievable, “Thank you for the lecture. It's your opinion and you're entitled to it. Now may I have the pleasure of not hearing your voice again?”

* * * * * *

So for the next week silence reigned supreme, making Hethria seem noisy in comparison. Never have I sustained such an extended fit of the sulks at such a cost, and it was no comfort that his wretched Scarthe made a charade of the entire thing. Never, even in thought, was I so determined not to thaw. By the week's end I was quite adept at turning my mind off to think nothing for hours at a time, and since he seemed perfectly content, we might have ridden in silence clear to Assharral, had not Hethria taken a hand in the game.

Traveling athwart a belt of low sandhills, we intersected the path of a thunderstorm. It must have passed a good month ago, giving Hethria time to respond in full, and it had been a narrow storm, barely the span of two sandhill crests. So it was without warning that we surmounted the western rise to find ourselves on the brink of a valley that brimmed with flowers.

Every desert blossom must have been there, scarlet, magenta, orange, pink, purple, white, an intense distilled-sky blue, in every shape from spike to daisy to pea to floweret. They nodded in tight profusion against the intense green of new leafage, the red earth, the leached desert sky, such unexpected profusion that before I could help it, I exclaimed aloud, “Oh, it's beautiful!”

Zam glanced round quickly, and as quickly smiled. It was the first time I had seen him smile. His face lit up, growing much younger, quite impish, a match at last for those remarkable gray eyes. No doubt I could have found no quicker way back to his good graces than to praise his beloved Hethria. Nor a better way of thawing the frost, however unintentional.

“Yes,” he answered aloud. “Yes, it is.”

When we reached the flowers he slid from the gray and walked by Vestar's shoulder, pointing a plant out with a boot-toe, touching the higher ones with light, careful fingers that made it a caress. I knew the morrethans, but there were scores of strangers as well. Heshnor, with woolly silver leaves and white daisy-like flowers; kerrothar, palm-wide blooms in pastel blue or pink or pristine white; fimbrethal, lilies like purple stars with hairy edges and golden hearts. Fimbravos lilies, gangly white multiple florets frail as spiders of snow; mallavos, delicate red long-petalled orchids. Legumes flowering scarlet, sunset orange, pink and lavender and hyacinth, and ilienlythe—“in a good year cattle come right out into Hethria after it”—with fleshy pointed green leaves and globes of heavy, spiky cerise flower. Shaggy yellow axvystar daisies, lydsith, flamboyantly bizarre claws of blossom, tawny yellow and black or maroon and emerald. And the blue flowers whose intense cobalt and azure shades eclipsed the very morrethans, whose thick crowds turned the valley floor to a rainbow cloud-mass, patched with lakes of sky.

he said.

Something very near affection was in his eyes, as it was in the way he touched the blooms, or his careful path amid the clumps, a more careful, more loving attention than any gardener's. It was earth's gift that moved him, not its mastery.

I was so enchanted by this abrupt, capricious display of Hethria's bounty that we were atop the farther slope before I realized the silence had not broken. I was, unawares, thinking my questions, and it was in mindspeech that he was answering me.

On the thought he glanced up.

I looked back onto the flowers, and in that moment I first felt the spell of Hethria. They were beautiful in themselves, more beautiful because they were unplanned, untended, more beautiful again because they were so rare, so uncharacteristic, such a contrast to their environment, as in a kinder land they could never be. And I understood what he meant. The silence too was an integral part of this landscape. Like the landscape, it did not deserve to be marred, by human presence or human voice.

I nodded. He vaulted back on the gray, and in perfect accord we looked once more into the flower valley, before we rode away.

* * * * * *

After that we rarely spoke aloud, though we were no longer uncommunicative. A few nights later, he said over the sinking fire,

How far then? I thought.

His glance grew a shade tentative.

No.
I recalled, with a start, that I had not left Everran for a sightseer's jaunter.
It's Beryx I came to see.

It was dark when we rode into Etalveth, but daylight proved it quite disappointingly normal, a knot of twisted streets, whitewashed flat-roofed houses, keerphar trees' grateful shade on glary white dust, lazy dogs, garrison people and off-duty soldiers, so familiar I might have been in Gebria. We slept in the caravanserai. When Zam went off to the horses, remarking, “We can go to the fort for morning audience,” I took a quick walk abroad, adjusting to the oddness of being among people, buildings, cultivation, domestic animals, and that constriction which comes from clipping the sky's edge. When I returned, Zam had disappeared.

Pest on him, I fretted in the tiny mud-brick colonnade room. Why must I come before Beryx trailing an aedr? How long will he be gone? He could have left a message, at the least.

Then it occurred to me that I would not arrive trailing Zam. He too was an aedr; he and Beryx would be long acquainted. It was Zam who would be trailing me.

I gave my habit a futile dust, my hair an equally vain brush-up, saddled Vestar and set off for the fort, half a mile out of town.

The gate guards' surcoats were the very green of Everran's livery, but their badge was a cluster of vivid vermilion dagger-petalled flowers. There was also a startling variety of breeds, red, yellow, white, black or bronze-skinned, though all perfectly polite. When I said, “I'm here to see the emperor,” the officer nodded at once, told me where to leave the mare, and added, “They'll be in the mess hall, ma'am.”

They?
I wondered, following a stream of local people, mostly shepherds by the smell.

The mess hall was also mud brick, relatively cool inside its thick walls, impregnated by the smell of all communal eating places, and just as scruffy. Nor had it been dressed up. No throne, no hangings, no costly furniture, not a flower. The tables had just been pushed back to the walls and the benches set in rows to face a line of chairs on the low dais. In the gloom of the undrawn shutters it looked shabby, dilapidated, so I thought in sudden anxiety, Was it really a myth? Does this emperor, legendary or otherwise, have any power at all?

My natural nervousness became a pang of dread. The shepherds had not sat politely on the benches but were squatted in groups, eating, dicing, gossiping, drinking wine from skins which shot a stream straight into your mouth. Where was the court, the lords, the chamberlain, the scribes and council, the herald and trumpeters?

Then a door opened onto the dais and a solitary woman came briskly in.

She was middle-aged, though slender and upright, with an unlined oval face and black hair so sleek and shining it needed no adornment but its simple knot in the nape of her neck, and the contrast with her white dress of eastern silk. The only other sign of wealth or rank was her bracelet, a chain of pea-sized thillians. And, when I looked closer, a gold signet, the badge of a monarch, on her right thumb.

The shepherds scrambled to their feet. Stunned, I realized this was the ruler of Assharral. Not an emperor, an empress.

Over the shepherds' heads her eyes met mine. Black eyes, blacker than a moonless midnight, shot with weaving golden motes of fire. I knew that motion. She was an aedr too.

I was still gaping when she came swiftly from the dais, the shepherds parting for a smile age had made no less bewitching, and a voice like running water: “You wouldn't mind waiting a moment, would you? Someone here has come so far it would be unjust to make her wait at all.” That smile would have made perfect justice of twice the iniquity.

Next moment I had been turned about, while that fluent music continued, “Come through here, I see no cause to bellow your affairs around all Kemrestan,” whisked down a passage to what was clearly the commandant's living room, a jug of scarlet flowers on the table among the remains of breakfast, and she was saying, “What have they done with the wine? Yes, Etalveth is a fleapit. I wish we had time to show you the rest of Assharral. Thangar and Tasmar are—”

I never heard what they were. A quick step and a clear, decisive voice with the ring of a trumpet and an undernote of irrepressible laughter preceded their owner through the door.

“Moriana, are you aware that half Kemrestan's spitting crusts and mutton-fat all over Ansor's mess hall, and if we don't move soon he'll be fit to—”

I knew him at once. The black hair was grizzled now, the face deeply trenched, and his right arm lay in a sling I did not remember remembering from the dream, but the eyes were the same, black-lashed almonds almost violently full of life and laughter and the aedric motion, glancing like sentient emeralds from the nobly boned face. The scar was there too, a purple blotch across his cheek. A livid purple, grown more livid as I looked. He was turning white.