The Red Country

Sylvia Kelso

Chapter III

Travel is ridiculously easy for a private citizen, uncumbered by fifty retainers with their beasts and baggage, as unrestricted by limits of fodder and lodging as by rigid schedules and time-consuming ceremony. I was pleased to find that my rule had also made it safe for a woman to travel alone. In one night I had turned east from the Astil crossroad. In three days I was on the marches of Gebria, seeking a picket for the mare and a bed for myself, and reveling in the simplicity of the thing.

It was in Gebria, in the public room of the little inn at Lynglos, mud-brick walls, beaten earth floor, tarsal-wood stools polished only by countless trouser seats, that I heard of the princess Sellithar’s sensational evaporation into thin air. Eyes see only what they expect to see: nobody looked twice at a quiet dusty girl in a gray habit with a leather forager’s cap on her cropped blond hair, so I sat quietly over my plate of beans while exclamation and conjecture whirled about my head.

The conjectures were wild and wonderful enough to make me choke on giggles. The conclusions left me first startled, then contending with a lump in the throat. Whatever the Confederacy and the nobles thought, it seemed the folk of Everran persisted in staying loyal. I might be abroad, on tour in Stiriand, subduing a Tirien revolt, or—this made me twitch—traveling in disguise to test the national mood; but wherever I was, I had not deserted them. Suggestions on my whereabouts grew ever wilder, till one gnarled old cripple who had been a gold-miner up north at Deltyr usurped the floor.

“Youse’re all cock-eyed, ’n thick as four-be-twos as well. She ain’t h’abroad, ’n she h’ain’t in h’Everran neither. Don’t youse know anything? She’s gorn to find a h’answer, same as Beryx did. ’N she’s gorn the just-same way. She’s gorn to ‘Ethriah.’ ” A scathing glance withered a would-be dissenter. “Don’t youse ever listen to a n’arper? What else’d Everran do?”

Having paid the score, I slipped upstairs to my hard, lumpy pallet bed, wondering at the uncanny intuition of ignorance, and oddly enough for such an absurd enterprise, feeling heartened as well.

Nor were there problems at Gebasterne for a private citizen. From a weaver who catered for desert hunters I bought a blue robe and a black turban, from a market saddler a big waterskin to hang over Vestar’s wither above my saddlebags. Then I went in search of a caravan.

One was due off next day. I found the master in his arched caravanserai room, propped on an elbow among his packs as he sipped mint-tea amid a babble of merchants sealing consignments, Sathellin discussing firewood prices, townsmen, agents and a stray hunter or two wanting a start on his way into Hethria. When they dispersed, I asked to join the caravan.

He said, “Alone?” I nodded. He gave me a flinty look. “And where would you be going?”

I returned an equally flinty look and a reply in the true Sathel manner.

“Traveling.”

That cut his questions short. He made sure my beast and gear were fit for the trip, and charged me fifteen gold rhodellin for “conveyancing.” Next morning, after a short but acrid contest with my turban, I joined the mile-long string of pack-beasts and side-saddle riders filing through the main gate of Gebasterne, took a last look at the guards’ green Everran livery, the Gebros’ height receding into the northern distance, and turned my face to the red levels spatched with meager dull green tussocks and scrawny trees that vanished into a horizon of surging red dunes. Hethria.

* * * * *

Though most of it was a howling desolation, plains of gibber stones and huge shifting sandhills that in the old days must have been perilous, it was also a country of hot color and many unfamiliar animals and plants, and unless you leave the Sathel roads there is no danger now. Every three days you are sure to find a dassyk, a staging-point, with its toll house and caravanserai and market and the ring of irrigated farms fed from immense underground cisterns, into which covered channels pour the water of Kemreswash. They made bright green islands in the desert red, shaded by subsidiary oases of life and sound in the innumerable groves of hellien trees. Not the short-lived staring white desert breed, but the lovely big river helliens whose bark echoes the subtle red shadings of Gebria, growing lovelier against their subtle gray-green foliage.

The Sathellin were still planting them: everywhere saplings rose amid the giants of five and six generations back. A Sathel—kindly for a Sathel—informed me in their terse way, “Use ’em for the salt. Irrigation brings it. Trees suck it up.”

The dassyx themselves were an agreeable surprise; not dirty, smelly, beggar-ridden desert fleapits rife with poverty and lassitude, but clean, vital centers built on a common plan with the efficiency of a military encampment, full of busy people doing a job with minimum fuss and maximum effect. Someone, I thought, had spent much time on them, someone with a clear sophisticated planner’s mind untrammeled by either advice or precedent.

I am not at all sure when I saw the rocks. Traveler’s time is a river, running unsegmented between ripples of routine and the road’s endless bed. I know they came after the gorges, monstrous defiles in the glaring red and gold rocks of Hethria, and after some of the ranges, whose rust-red and indigo dulled in comparison, and which annoyed me with their impression of ancient, ancient places stubbornly intruding into the present world.

The rocks emerged, not from a range’s chine, but as a single bulge on the northeast horizon. Gradually they increased to a hump, then a cluster of humps. Then they swelled to gigantic mushroom domes with colors that deepened from pale pink and lilac pastels to the glaring rusted-blood shades of Hethria at close quarters. They were certainly the oddest sight of the journey, and eventually I asked a Sathel about them.

He gave me a sidelong look, said “Eskan Helken. Red Castle,” and instantly walked away.

My heart leapt. However ignominiously, I had to admit that after all, Eskan Helken was a place, a fact. Perhaps, so soon, so simply, the dream’s promise would be fulfilled. Who knew what was up there, or what use it would be? Who cared?

I was so elated as to forget my principles and seek hearsay about the place from other Sathellin, but none would say anything more. It drove me to vain speculation, then to vexation. Sathel brusqueness always irritated me, but this suggested more than discourtesy; it was nearer information willfully denied. When we were close enough, I resolved, I would explore Beryx’s “Red Castle” for myself.

* * * * *

The road ran within five or six miles of the cluster’s southern side, and we chanced to make a second-night halt near the closest point. I waited till men and beasts were busy with food, then I saddled Vestar and rode casually eastward until a sandhill would mask my approach. I had an idea the Sathellin silence might not stop at words.

At close quarters the rocks rose sheer from the sand, solid stone masses taller than Asterne, more massive than any human tower, bitten into capes and coves and welded together like the lobes of a liver or brain. It was the last hour of sunset, and the light softened them to the true Helkent color, a kind of liquid, golden-fired cornelian. I rode slowly along, craning up at their summits, wondering if Beryx had indeed come here, and why?

The other riddles revived. What more did he want to “learn,” what had he already learnt, and from whom? And if he had come back, did he stay? As bones picked clean atop one of those towers? Or—abruptly one of the legends recurred to me, that aedryx lived longer than humankind. Out in Hethria it seemed unnervingly plausible. Perhaps he was watching me from one of those eyries even now.

Expulsion of this fancy took such effort that I had ridden upon the grass-cove before I noticed. Then I pulled up hard, and jerked Vestar’s head from her eager snatch at the grass.

It was a broad-mouthed bay set deep amid the domes, and it was all grass, clear up to the bay head: fresh grass, emerald-bright against the rock walls that were now gored with shadow like twilit blood, though the last sun still laid lines of molten gold along their crests. The mare tugged at her bit. I sat staring, hardly able to credit my eyes. Not sand and scattered herbage and scrawny desert trees, but a pelt of grass. Lush, fresh, long grass, so long it was running like grain under the wind.

Naturally I rode in. There would be a spring to feed this phenomenon, and I was interested to find its site. We made our way up the western wall, and at the bay head I was gratified to find a deep oblique cleft in the rock, with seepage gleams on its stony floor. It struck me that it would be still more interesting to find the spring’s true head.

Dismounting, I dropped the reins. Vestar instantly began to feed, but I knew she would not go far. I started into the cleft.

It was longer than it had looked. For what seemed hours I slipped and clawed and scrambled upward, propelled by gathering eagerness, for now it seemed likely I had found the gate into Eskan Helken itself. When a small voice whispered that I might find more than I had bargained for, I ignored it. There was no point in idle imaginings.

The cleft opened. Red-gold light bathed a little rock cup clearly made by human hands, laid a solid golden sheet upon the contained water, glistered like gold-leaf on the enveloping ferns. The fountainhead. I turned about and gasped, seeing all Hethria laid out below.

It was a minute or two before I recollected my surroundings, and then it was to recognize a mistake. This was not the actual springhead. I was at the base of a V-shaped pocket which rose to the real battlements of Eskan Helken, a pocket rich in vegetation, even a couple of tall finlythe trees halfway up, and at the very top rose a low mound of yet richer greenery, worked with the tapestry of flowers.

I climbed up. Hethria lay out below me, a desert metamorphosed by evening to a fairytale red country of gold and liquid fire. But soon its impact faded under that of the pocket itself.

I am not susceptible to atmospheres—Zathar used to say my hair would lie flat in the cave of Maerdrigg’s kin—but something about that little oasis in the rocks’ ward impressed even my rational mind. It was not simply the silence of Hethria, which had lapped the caravan from our first day beyond the Gebros, a vast sea about a passing boat. This was a more potent quiet: a listening, aching emptiness, an awareness of loss and vacancy, a stillness all but sentient. I found myself minded of graveyards, whose hush is not tranquility but a vacuum crying the absence of the dead.

When that image came to mind I almost stopped. Then I shook myself, surveyed the grass slopes, the rocks abrim with light, told myself not to be everything I most despised, and went on.

The springhead was beside the mound, a still tinier cup bedded among huge old untended plants of mint. So I knew someone had lived there, before I turned to the mound and made out, under fallen beams and a creeper’s profusion of black and scarlet bloom, the ground-plan of a house.

It was lost now, only humps and mounds to mark its dissolution, under the rampant vines. The wind had dropped. The spring ran without a sound. No birds came to drink. Hethria, the outer perimeter, was utterly quiet. There was a cave behind the creepers, but I did not go in. Telling myself that I had found the spring, that Beryx was naturally not here, there were no wizards, and that whoever had lived here could no longer resent or gainsay my visit, I went to look at the flowers.

They grew on a sort of bed raised from the hill-slope, a dozen desert plants with silver gray leguminous leaves and clusters of the most amazing blooms. At each blossom’s center a silky, grape-black spot capped the knot of the two petals, which resembled a vertically set double-pointed canoe. But those petals were a shade like living ruby, brighter than heart’s blood, the very essence and idea of Red.

I had gone on my knees to examine them, marveling at the bizarre shape, the juxtaposed colors, the sheer wonder of such flamboyance on the dowdy gray plants, and had just decided to pick one in case a Sathel could identify it, when I perceived, and recognized, the nature of their bed. Six feet long, four feet wide, raised a foot or so above the ground.

I was kneeling on a grave.

At times the most rational of us lose our heads. I jumped up and backed away, I only just managed not to turn and run. Then my eyes lifted from the flowers.

He was facing me across the grave. He wore a blue desert robe and black turban, pulled down to hang in loops about his neck in the Sathel way. A young man about my own age, clean-shaven, with untidy light-brown hair, a square jaw, and gray eyes so air-clear and pure they seemed to come right out of his sunburnt face.

I did not think, a ghost, a wizard, Beryx, salvation, how did he get here, is he dangerous? I could not think at all.

Heartbeats went by, and I heard every one. My heart was a giant drum right up in the base of my throat; it was so loud I thought the very walls of Eskan Helken must begin to shake.

“Her name was Fengthira,” he said.

The silence parted to receive his voice, and closed again behind it; I had a stupid fancy that it welcomed his speech as much as it would have resented any words of mine.

“The flowers are morrethans. Desert fire. We planted them for her.”

My tongue moved at last, uttering the first words, sensible or not, that rose to mind.

“Your eyes,” I said stupidly, “are gray.”

Though they were so clear as to seem transparent, that clarity was an illusion. They were actually translucent, clear but depthless, and light moved in them like the patternings of air made visible.

“No, I’m not Beryx,” he said.

I think I choked.

He watched me impassively. Then he said, “I don’t live here. One of us just comes up each moon to tend the grave.”

That time I know I choked. It is more than eerie to have your questions answered before they reach mental words.

“I saw your mare,” he said. “But it’s no matter. With you, Fengthira wouldn’t mind.”

Insult exploded me back to reality. “Do you know who I am?”

He answered matter-of-factly, “The princess Sellithar.”

I may have gulped. I certainly could not speak. Inscrutable as the very rocks, he waited through my struggle to collect myself.

“And just who”—I did achieve belligerence—“are you?”

“I am warden of the roads,” he answered, “for southern Hethria. My name is Zam.”

I almost burst out laughing. “That isn’t a name!”

He did not smile. “My twin brother,” he said, “is Zem.”

“This-and-That!” I was hiccupping against laughter I could feel would quickly, despicably, become hysterical. “What sort of idiot would call—”

“You admired my father’s design for the staging-points, I believe.”

He spoke without anger, affront, defensiveness. After a moment he added, still dispassionate, “Perhaps you should sit down.”

“No!” Shock had to be eased somehow. “I never faint! Do you take me for some screeching kitchen-girl? And how do you know—you spied on me—how could you, I never said that to a single soul, I—who are you? What are you? What are you doing here?”

“I told you all that. I suppose what you want to ask is, How do I know what you think? That comes from being an aedr. It’s one of our arts. Reading thoughts.”

He must have been able to move very fast when he chose to move at all. I came round sitting on the grass, propped against his shoulder, while he used one dripping turban end to lave my face. His shoulder was solid as a rock. His hands were a workman’s, a soldier’s, square, rough-skinned, knurled by calluses from shield, sword, pick and axe. As I swam up out of darkness that cool, maddening voice was saying, “. . . just shock, after a deal of strain. You’ve no cause for shame.”

I was never so blazingly angry in my life. First at behaving like some weak-kneed noblewoman, second for the betrayal of Kastir and all my principles by such a surrender to the irrational; third, and worst, that it had happened in front of him. Lastly because, however sensible you may be, when a woman faints she does expect a man to show concern if not a little panic, at the least to ask how she feels. And not to calmly diagnose the causes before, additional insult, he reads your mind to anticipate your private judgment of the lapse.

I jerked myself off his shoulder and literally slapped his hands away. “How dare you! Let me go!”

He promptly did so, actually rising so I had to get myself on my feet. That made me angrier still. Twilight had closed in, but I could feel he was untouched either by concern or insult, and that enraged me most of all.

“You’d best go down,” he said, “if you can manage it. The water-road will be dark already. You might slip on the rocks.”

“No!” Chagrin made me childish. “I shall go when I’m ready and not a moment before!”

He said, “As you like.” Then he turned away, knelt down, and began to weed the grave.

I stood with my back to the rock wall, feeling an utter fool, denied the barest sketch of a riposte. He went on weeding, his hands incongruously deft and delicate amid the fragile plants, the vivid flowers.

The light had darkened to sheets of dried blood and mulberry, the zenith was quite colorless. Valinhynga pricked through, an infinitely remote white drop of fire. The silence endured, formidable, sentient. Only now I felt that it was laughing at me, as a sage laughs at a loved but temperamental child whose tantrums will be neither punished nor heeded, merely tolerated until it comes to sense.

Under that kindly amusement my anger drained away. Stupid, I told myself. You came seeking a mystery, and have found a legend. It is not superstition, belief or hearsay. He did not claim to read your thoughts, he gave you proof of it. He exists. He is an aedr. The legends are fact. Stop acting the spoilt brat, then. Use your schooling to accept the evidence, and make the most of it.

He straightened from the grave. Not even those eyes could vanquish the dusk, he was a mere featureless shape, but nothing could affect his voice.

“I’m sorry if I upset you. I don’t know much about girls.”

With heroic effort I suppressed cries of “I’m a princess, not a ‘girl’!” If he would just laugh at something, anything, even me! But it was not the time for exasperation to be unpent.

“I’m sorry myself. You startled me, and I was rude.” It was time to begin the campaign. “Are you going down now?”

He looked away to the grave. The farewell was overt, as to a living friend.

He said, “Yes.” Then he paused.

Such a tiny pause, I hardly noticed, and yet it was what I had so vainly striven for, the rock’s first breach. But in another instant he went on: “Are you ready to leave yourself?”

* * * * *

We walked in silence down the slope under the brightening stars. The cleft was pitch-black. I carefully suppressed umbrage when he said, “You’d best take my hand. I know the way.” In truth I was glad of the support, as for his occasional warning of slippery slabs or unexpected drops.

We emerged into the grass bay, a width of starlight luminous after the cleft’s inky depths. He whistled on the threshold of breath, I caught the sweet sweaty horse smell, saw a gray shadow drifting up to us, a darker one behind, and had just time for amazement that Vestar should come to anyone’s summons, before he had the reins over her head and was saying diffidently, “Do you need help?”

“I can manage, thanks.” Grimly, I kept the tone polite.

He said, “Good,” and turned to the gray in something like relief.

I found my off-stirrup, and came sharply to my wits. In a moment he might be gone, the whole fantastic journey made for nothing, the dream’s “salvation” let slip through my hands. He had vaulted onto the gray, I remember wondering why he did not use a stirrup like ordinary men, we were ready to move off. I took breath for a pretext, something, anything. He said, once more with a shade of diffidence, “I want to see your caravan master. Do you mind if we ride together?” And my “Good” came before I knew it was said.

Vestar stepped out, eager for her temporary home. His beast matched her, we were in the concealing, easing dark. I chose and rejected a dozen openings. And then I thought, Fool. If he reads minds, what need for a gambit? As little as there is for speech.

“We were born in Assharral.” He picked up the cue without so much as finding it worthy of remark. “When Beryx came, our father was captain of the palace guard.”

I stifled a gasp. He spoke of Beryx as an acquaintance, a contemporary.

“Then our family came here, so Fengthira could teach us Ruanbrarx, the aedric arts. We had the aptitude, but the skills have to be learnt. Beryx couldn’t teach us. It has to go from man to woman, or women to men. So my father became warden of the roads for Hethria. When he died, we inherited the work.”

Just like Everran, I thought in disgust.

“Zem watches the north, I take the south.” A deep affection entered his voice. “We look after Eskan Helken too. Nobody else would dare go up there, even now. Fengthira didn’t like humans. She scared off the Hethox”—I knew he meant the Hethrian nomads—“and the Sathellin respected her. They still do. That’s why no one would tell you anything about the place.”

You are being answered, I told myself, your unformulated questions divined as you expected. It is a fact. Accept it as such.

“I didn’t know you were there. To tell truth, I never knew you were in Hethria, let alone who you were, until we met. I thought it was chance. But you had a dream of some kind?”

Automatically I replied aloud. “I dreamt of Beryx saying he would come here—‘first’?”

“He came here to become an aedr. Fengthira taught him too. After the dragon, he came back.”

One riddle solved. When he did not continue, I went on myself.

“The Phathos said the dream meant I should look for help in the east. For Everran. You know what’s happening there?”

“I do now.”

Subduing the shock, I thought, Then you know the rest. And then embarrassment swamped me as my mind, with thought’s unruly speed, replayed my calculations as we mounted, my jibes to the Phathos—fight a war with Sathellin? Bury the Confederacy in sand? And I knew he shared the recollection and I could not stop it. It is impossible to think any way but candidly, and thoughts cannot be masked like speech.

“Don’t mind that,” he said. It could have been approval. “You’re managing far better than most people. When they first meet an aedr they’re usually too panicked to think, let alone plan to make some use of us.”

“And,” he went on, “you were quite right about Hethria. Sathellin couldn’t fight a war.”

I stared into the dark. Only as it crumbled did I see what a tower I had built on the promise of a dream, on the foundation of vague, irrational hopes.

“I think,” he said beside me, “that I should send you on to Assharral. They have the numbers and the army and the experience for this. And Beryx would never deny a ruler in your situation. Especially a ruler of Everran. It’s still very dear to him.”

The campfires opened ahead of us, low red stars under the heavens’ stars. A little wind sighed over the desert, cold through the hairs that had risen, prickling, bristling, on my scalp.

“You mean—he’s alive?”

“Beryx?” At last I had produced a reaction. “Of course. Beryx is the Assharran emperor.”

When I found myself clinging to the saddle pommel with the mare halted and his arm upholding me, my first words were pure mortification, impossible to suppress. “I never do this, ever, ever! And that makes twice in the one night!”

“It’s rather much when Once-upon-a-time suddenly turns into Now.”

This time his stolidity was a relief. I took slow deep breaths and waited for the swimming in my head to stop.

Just as I decided I could retrieve the reins, he removed his arm, and I never bothered to say, “Thank you, I can manage now.”

As the horses moved forward, he returned to the point. “Indeed, I think I’d best take you to Assharral—” He broke off. Then showed symptoms of awkwardness at last. “I mean—I do know the roads. You could do it alone, but it would be slower, and riskier. And a caravan’s much too slow.”

I took breath. Bit back outrage, refutation, assertions of independence and adequacy, furious cries of “I’m not a child, nor a useless female!” Yells of “I can look after myself!” Thought in despair that it was pointless to bridle my tongue with an aedr, who could read my thoughts, who knew I was thinking this. . . . “Oh, Four take it!” I cried, and began to laugh in sheer exasperation. “This is ridiculous!”

“I’m sorry.” In default of laughter, he did sound a shade contrite. “If it consoles you at all, I can’t help myself. We had empathy, we could read our parents’ thoughts in our cradles. It was how Beryx found us. Most aedryx only use thought-reading, Scarthe, when they want. We have no choice.”

Such is the speed of thought, our horses could not have gone five strides before I had passed from, Four, how unfair life is, why was I denied that gift, what would any ruler give for it, to, But imagine the fear and distrust and calculation with which everyone must react to him, the same way you did, and he’s aware of it all, to, And think what is in people’s minds, imagine being exposed to all the greed, hate, lies, pettiness, having it pushed at you whether you want it or not, to, Four, the poor devil, to, Who am I calling poor—I snapped that off and opened my mouth.

“Thank you,” he said politely. “But I’m used to it. Just try to carry on as if it doesn’t happen. That’s the kindest thing you could do.”

I choked down further outrage and confined myself to noting, with relief, that we were almost into camp.

It was a malicious pleasure to watch his effect on the Sathellin, not to mention the change in their attitude towards me. They were not obsequious, no Sathel could manage it. But for the first and only time someone held Vestar while I dismounted, the caravan master came in person to ask Zam to his fire, carefully widening the invitation to me, and the whole camp buzzed with what you could only call nervous respect. Small wonder, I thought, as I sipped my mint-tea and listened to the caravan master walking on verbal eggs. How do you cheat a warden who can read your very mind?

Yet he seemed just enough. He made conversation, however superfluous, about the trip, the loading, the weather further west, prospects for the season ahead. If there was no kindness, no merriment, nor was there any hint of oppression or exploitation. A fair ruler, I decided, if a stern one. One you might not love, but could probably trust.

His reputation came in useful, too. Rising from the fire, he said casually, “I shall go on ahead of you. Escorting the princess Sellithar.” And though the caravan master shot me a boggle-eyed glance, I knew neither he nor any other soul in the caravan would breathe a word of scandal; would indeed rigorously keep themselves from the slightest thought of it.

* * * * *

We left at dawn, which revealed why he had not used a stirrup the previous night. His gray was a young dry mare, and he rode not merely bareback but bridleless.

He did not have to see me looking, of course. Leading the way out of camp, he said over his shoulder, “Wreve-lan’x. Beast-mastery. Another art.” He glanced briefly at the caravan, uncoiling its sluggish snake of pack-beasts and black turbans and thin red dust, thence out to the sand-dunes and up at Eskan Helken, robed in the lilacs and hyacinths of Hethria at dawn. Then his eye moved to Vestar.

All my touchy pride reviving, I broke out, “She’ll keep up with yours perfectly well!”

He said, “We’ll go, then,” and clicked a canter from the gray.

How I wished, before sunset, to have left that unsaid! It is one thing to hurry at your own pace, or to dawdle with a caravan. It is quite another to match someone moving at their speed, with a better horse, used to the country and—no, I have to admit it, it was a fact—with better endurance than yours.

By noon my legs felt like wet string. By mid-afternoon I would have died sooner than ask for a halt, but I was ignobly praying—again I must admit it—that he would read my mind, favor my weakness, however galling its admission, and call a stop.

An hour later I was convinced he meant me to work out the proof of my false bravado to the end, that he was cruel, vindictive, the most odious man I ever had the misfortune to come across, that I would sooner die than ride another day with him, that I would go on alone and let Hethria kill me and Everran take its chance.

Vestar was flagging, I could feel the sogginess grow in her responses, compounded by the flop of my tired weight. All around Hethria glared at us, treeless, waterless, dust-red undulations of rock and sand cavorting under the heat haze and the mirage and the pitiless, draining sun. In late afternoon, when the sun itself had lost its sting, the heat remained, pouring back out of the oven-heated ground.

Though she too was dark with sweat, the gray mare showed no sign of distress. Curse you, I thought to her rider’s obdurately upright back, if I had a knife I’d stick it into you. . . . He glanced round. Then swung from the road into the untrodden desert to its south.

Autumn storms had made a temporary oasis in a claypan, already fringed by quick-responding grass and every kind of herbage, even a couple of desert figs in flower. Flights of brilliant gweldryx were mirrored on teal-blue water as they fled irately from our advance; a furry lydyr shot under an istarel bush, a big wyresparyx lizard scuttled on crocodile legs, tail throwing spurts of sand. I was past attention. I did not argue, let alone attempt to help when he watered the horses, unsaddled Vestar, slung down the saddlebags, collected firewood, and set a tiny traveler’s kettle to boil.

I was still flat in the sand when he brought a cup of steaming-hot mint tea. Shamefully, I could not produce so much as a token denial of its need.

He had not spoken all day, and silence endured when I was fit to join the routine of making camp: gather more wood, pool our food, choose bed spots and unroll the cloaks a desert night demands. Our silence melted us into the greater silence of Hethria, making its hush oddly companionable.

The sun sank, the air cooled at last. An odd bird or animal crept back to the water, emboldened by our quiet. It was restful to lie beyond the fire’s range and watch the last splendid reds and golds die from Eskan Helken, its domes turning rose-black before they vanished in the dark. Fifty miles away, I estimated, watching them under my heavy eyelids, and into weariness and wounded self-esteem crept a shadow of pride.

“Fifty-five,” he said from across the fire.

No doubt, I thought savagely before I could help myself, it would have been sixty-five but for me.

“No.” He sounded expressionless as ever. “I was hurrying to make Cruin Los. This waterhole. That was far enough.”

A jolt of indignation sat me up. He forestalled me.

“There was no point in talking till you felt better about it. And most of it didn’t need to be said.”

“Curse you!” I had erupted before I could stop myself. “How dare you! Read my feelings—let me eat my words and then stew all day in my own juice—‘wait till I felt better’—sit there till you thought I wouldn’t bite your head off and then patronize me like—like—oh, I could strangle you!”

He said resignedly, “I did wait, yes. It hasn’t seemed to help.”

“Oh!” I could hardly think, I was so furious at succumbing to fury, and a fury that was unwarranted, unreasonable, when he had been attempting tact and I was in the wrong and it was my own fault and I could not even admit that.

He did not apologize, explain, try to appease me. He would not quarrel either. He simply got up and walked away.

* * * * *

We rode mute all next day, I in deepest dudgeon, he probably aware of speech’s futility, and we rode more slowly, so I seethed away, refusing to demean myself by shouting that I could go faster, that I would not be coddled, further enraged by the certainty that he knew what I felt. I could not even sulk in privacy.

In the same cold silence we camped, he apparently unaffected, I absorbed in trying to stop my thoughts. I was still engaged in this fruitless exercise when I realized he had risen to his feet beside the fire, staring toward a red glow in the south.

After quick deductions, quicker adjustments, and the decision to disparage Hethria, I said, “What in the Four’s name is there to burn out here?”

“Hethox,” he replied cryptically. “Down on Xathan Syr. The big grass-belt. And a hunting fire. It will burn till it finishes the torjer—the spiny grass—and they have to shift their ground.”

“So?”

“So then there’ll be tribes at odds. Skirmishes. People killed.” The tone remained passionless. “I’ve told them fifty times, and they never heed.”

I stoppered mental conjecture with verbal inanity. “What are you going to do?”

He took his time to answer. You would, I thought, stuffing speculations back into mental limbo. Hurry up!

“If there was rain about,” he said at last, “I could divert it there. Or if there was wind, I could blow the fire back on itself. What I should do is use a Command and make them beat it out themselves. But it only frightens them silly, and doesn’t teach them anything.”

My mouth opened and shut. Swamped in wrath over his empathy, I had never thought to wonder if an aedr had other powers.

“Yes,” he said. “I can do any of those things.” I still could not speak. “Wrevurx, the weather words, give power over rain and wind. The Commands are lower level arts. They only affect minds. Wreviane, the fire art, isn’t as easy for me as for Beryx, because he’s Heagian. But I think I can manage this.”

My mind reeled under this barrage of gibberish, to recoil on stronger grievances.

“No.” He sounded a little weary. “You needn’t wait while I ride over there to fight it, or go to muster help. You won’t have to help me, either. Ruanbrarx, they’re called. Mind acts. I’ll put it out from here. With my mind.”

Before I had rallied to resent that speech’s innuendo rather than its content, he had sat down with his back to me, head on hands, elbows on knees, and begun to breathe.

Breathe? In that dead hush of night-time Hethria it was like the approach of a storm; each successive breath was held longer, exhaled longer, developing a rasp, a choking roar that first alarmed, then cowed, then positively terrified me. A dozen times I thought he had had some sort of seizure and leapt up to run with vain but basic human instinct to his help. The most fantastic terrors assailed me. He would throw a fit, strangle himself, die, I should be left alone in the wild, or accused of murdering him, I should have to plead innocence to the Sathellin, to Beryx himself, who in this light became an ogre of legendary size. You must remember that I had never before seen an aedr use the Arts. Though they are called mind-acts, they involve more than the mind.

My panic has left no idea of how long it went on. Unconsciously I had crept closer, the Four know why, to his back. It was there I found myself, mouth dry, bathed in sweat, heart pounding like a hammer-mill, when the dreadful breathing slowed, diminished, and he seemed to fall apart, slumping and then rolling sideways to lie limply in the sand.

In a pang of pure horror I snatched his wrist. But the pulse was there, hammering fast and thunderously as my own. I sprang up to run for the kettle, already filled for breakfast, water to dash in his face—but before I could reach my feet he said faintly, rather flatly, <Boil it instead.> And I had neither time nor inclination to dispute.

By the time the fire roused he had sat up, groggily wiping his face. The new flames showed me the trembling wrists, the slick streams of sweat on his jaw, the great black patches on his robe, the sag of limbs and trunk that denote a man stripped of physical strength. I shot back to his side, pushed him flat, and snapped, “Lie down, idiot!”

He went down with a thump, unable to help himself, and I yanked the closest saddlebag to push under his head. Sounding a little plaintive, he said, <That really isn’t necessary.>

I was looking full in his face when he spoke, and the hair lifted on my neck. For his lips had not moved.

<Lathare,> he said. <Mindspeech. Easier just now. . . . You needn’t be afraid.>

And I suddenly found I had been inching back as if my limbs had assumed a life of their own, that my fingers had stiffened, by some age-old reflex, into the evil sign.

For a moment those gray eyes were no longer opaque, and what they revealed was grief. Simple human hurt. Then he spoke aloud, just audible, with such effort I understood why he had not done so before.

“I am not a . . . sorcerer.”

A pell-mell surge of thought recalled the full implications of his empathy, constructed from that brief reaction how he must feel about all the distrust, fear, outright terror that ordinary people must inflict on him, showed me an aedr’s power was equal fortune and curse. And I understood that here, if nowhere else, he was vulnerable. To have him at my mercy, I need only continue showing fear.

Even at thought’s speed the realization hardly formed before it spawned refusal, and the refusal its corollary of pity that I hid more swiftly than I had ever thought in my life.

“I know that,” I said.

* * * * *

We did not speak again until the tea was drunk, we had eaten, and he was sitting up, apparently recovered and safe inside his usual impassivity. I had been looking into the south, now lit only by stars, reflecting that he was a better ruler than I judged. He could have lost his temper with the Hethox. With those powers he could have meted out some fearful punishment. Yet he had mended their damage, and withheld so much as their just deserts. It must take a great capacity for patience and kindness, I thought, not only to pardon the crime but to right the damage yourself, and at such a fearful cost. . . .

“I’m afraid you have it wrong,” he said. “It’s Hethria I really care about.”

I goggled anew as I envisaged that vast, useless, hostile waste which surrounded us, merely waiting in its unforgiving way for our one mistake which would offer it its revenge.

“The Hethox can take care of themselves,” he said. “They’ve done it for thousands of years. But a fire like that isn’t just inefficient, wasteful, killing far more game than they can eat. It destroys the land for a decade or more. This has been a wet autumn.” I gulped again. “Plants had come up down there that don’t shoot in forty years; it would have been a good breeding season for birds and animals; even the waterbag frogs would have woken up. Now that’s ruined. Not to mention that, if a sandstorm comes through before the torjer recovers, that part of Hethria will just lift up and blow away. Destruction. Wanton waste.” His quiet tone made it a blasphemy. “Hethria would be a beautiful country, without men.”

I thought of the Sathellin.

“Roads. Caravans. Farms. Water from Kemreswash. Salt. My father taught us how to check it. Now that it’s stopped, Zem and I are taking care they don’t expand. Roads, yes. Settlement, no.”

Puzzled, I wondered, Why?

He said flatly, “It would be too much. There are roads because Beryx wants them, but they strain the natural balance already. More farms would mean more irrigation, more salt, too many ignorant farmers to compensate. The ruin of what soil Hethria does have. A real desert, where nothing could grow. It shan’t happen. Not if I can help it.” And, said that hint of steel, I will.

My eyes returned to that horizontal horizon, blackness unbroken by any hill, building, natural or man-made resource, and the thought burst up: But what a loss, what a waste, a life devoted to shepherding nomads and restraining savages, denied all the grace and comfort of civilization, the mere pleasure of running water and green grass!

And with an aedr, it’s not merely a waste, it’s criminal. Those powers could make him a general, a great engineer, a city builder, a ruler, a nation-founder. He could have wealth, rank, power, his choice of human felicity—

He clicked his tongue. The Sathel idiom retained from Gebria, which expresses denial, contradiction, disdain. “Did all that bring such happiness to you?”

Having recovered, I came back, “I’m not an aedr. You would never have my problems. You could have whatever you want—”

“I already have what I want.”

In the shadow of the wilderness I saw those endless days riding in its empty heat, patiently curbing its ignorant denizens, balancing, tending, with endless vigilance, in endless loneliness. And for what? An unforgiving desert not improved, but simply preserved. Still unable to forgive.

The words sprang without consideration from my thoughts. “You must be . . . very fond of Hethria.”

His face was tilted up to the sharp, close desert stars. He answered softly, with perfect certainty.

“I belong to it.”

This time I stared in wonder. I had endowed him with my own emotions for Everran, a deep, possessive protectiveness. For its sake I would probably have suffered death as well as banishment, yet I had never seen myself as belonging to Everran. It was Everran that belonged to me.

© 2008 Sylvia Kelso

First published by Fivestar Books

http://members.iinet.net.au/~sakelso

Like to buy the whole book in print version? Try Powell's Bookshop now