The Red Country 

 Sylvia Kelso 

Chapter V

As with the days between my father’s death and funeral, that next time seems separate, distinct, divorced from everything else. Hard to reassemble now. I recall that the most nerve-wracking part was to actually get clear of Assharral, and that I was obsessed, not with the fear that Zam or even Beryx would try to stop me, but with the thought that a caravan might not leave that day, so I should be forced to ruin my grand exit by creeping pusillanimously back into Etalveth for the night. I had seen enough of Hethria to know I could not cross it alone.

But a caravan had gone that very morning, and the caravanserai keeper, unaware what ravages lay under my gratefully concealing turban, told me quite calmly that, “If you canter along you’ll catch ’em this high noon.” I paid my score, savagely disentangled my belongings, and sent Vestar at more than a canter along the wide swathe of hoof-tracks toward the west.

No one tried to stop me. No one pursued me. It made me half-thankful, half miserable. I must have made good use of that new skill in closing the mind on that return journey, for even at the caravan’s pace most of Hethria remains a blur. It was easier, of course, because we kept to the Sathel roads this time. The memories were all rooted elsewhere.

The most harrowing part of all, I am still quite sure, began when I rode under the arch at Gebasterne and saw with shock that the gate guards were dressed in Estarian gray. From there to Saphar it grew steadily worse. I never realized how much I had esteemed, taken for granted, needed the past I had been so set on discarding, until it was lost. It was not just the mass of new cultivation, the swollen towns, the babble of strange dialects, the gray Estarian clothes everywhere. It was the pang, over and over, of unconsciously expecting some well-known landmark, a portico, a crested door, an ancient well or long-cursed awkward gate, to find with shock that something new, often better, always rawly assimilated, was in its place.

These repeated blows numbed the major changes: the dispossession of vine and hethel lords whose estates were being cut into scores of tiny holdings, the royal council replaced by an “Assembly” supposedly elected by the people instead of selected by age and competence, the highlands’ ample horizons lost under a flood of small settlers still squatted under tent or bark or branch; the town gates and towers that flew, instead of Everran’s shield and vine, Estar’s white star on gray. I think the only time tears actually came into my eyes was when I rode up through Saphar to the palace gatehouse, and glanced up at the arch to see the crest had been chipped away.

It was older than our dynasty, indeed older than Beryx’s. It had been the personal crest of the kingdom’s founder, Berrian, not the shield and vine of our standard but a wide unblinking eye. In childhood I had imagined its stony stare rebuffing night-walkers and bogeymen, and taken courage from the fancy. Now it was gone, and some intangible protection seemed to have gone with it, leaving Everran naked, at the mercy of the world and time.

The palace had changed too, of course. At home Estar’s real rulers either flaunt or eschew luxury, but abroad its minions are wise to avoid extremes. Kastir had deemed the palace decorations an extreme. The carpets were gone, the queen’s mosaic was painted over, scribes had replaced servants, only absolute necessities like the audience hall’s rosewood roofbeams had been left alone. The journey had prepared me for that, as it had for soldiers instead of a chamberlain who were ready to bar me at the gatehouse; until I found a savage pleasure in pulling down my turban and saying with the full blast of regal frost, “Kastir will see me. I am the princess Sellithar.”

Kastir did not only see, he came to meet me in person. We eyed each other across the stone gatehouse floor with doubt, awkwardness, awareness of all that lay between us, neither confident enough to begin. Then he bowed deeply.

“Princess,” he began. “Sellithar. . . . There is much you must regret. As I do. I did try to respect your orders. And to . . . divine your wishes. You always wanted to remove the past. I have tried to . . . do what would please you, within my power.”

And he looked at me so beseechingly it was almost easy to forget what he had done to Everran. To answer, “What’s done is done, Kastir. Now is now. I came to remind you that you once made me an offer.” His hands jerked. “I told you I needed time to think. But I have done thinking now.”

For a moment he seemed paralyzed. Then he caught his breath. Bowed yet more deeply. After a moment, with great awkwardness, he captured my hand, kissed it, and murmured, “I can only hope I shall make you as . . . happy as you make me.”

* * * * *

If I was neither happy nor contented in that time, it was not misery. Rather, it seems, I felt very little at all. Everran’s changes, Estar’s ascendancy, dethronement itself did not seem to touch me, any more than Kastir himself. Our marriage never sank to quarrels, hatred, even loathing. It was always correct, usually calm, often amiable. And cold. Not that Kastir was a poor or clumsy lover. But in bed it is not skill or the body itself that matters. It is the flame, or absence of the flame within.

I did take a kind of bitter pleasure from learning to outplay my teacher on the Estarian political instrument. I played it so well that I won access to that holy of holies, the archives of Estarian intelligencers, and with it, the truth of that ancient supposed conspiracy. And when I knew beyond doubt that a forger had copied my mother’s hand, that it was all planned as leverage for a Quarred House faction seeking to rule the Tingrith, then with the patient pressure, enlistment of this one’s favor, compulsion of that one’s assistance, satisfaction of the other’s greed, which passes as the people’s consent in Estar, I contrived the return of my family to Saphar; found them a house in the city, and assured Sazan and Haskar of a future, if not that of a royal prince.

I also managed to have a large part of the Estarian army train in Stiriand, where they most effectively buffered the Lyngthirans, while I secured the livings of old retainers like Nerthor, and promoted the careers of those, like Karyx, who still mattered to me. Further, I achieved a diplomatic success that actually drew the Estarian shophet’s congratulations, when a compromise with Quarred permitted the annual return of their sheep. In smaller numbers, since the tide of settlement was creeping up the Raskelf hills, but sufficient to restore our balance of trade, which pleased Kastir too. He was ever sensitive to the need for Everran to pay its way. We both knew that if it did not, Estar might replace its governor.

I shut my mind to that threat, just as I shut it to the unruly images that sometimes escaped from memory, glimpses of a red country capricious as the wind, cruel, lavish, austere, beautiful, of a red-gold sunset on the looming rocks of Eskan Helken, of secret waterholes that exploded into jeweled gweldryx flights, of gray eyes in luminous motion against a backdrop of vivid, ephemeral flowers. When one of those caught me unawares I would go down to look at the blank shield over the gatehouse, and tell myself sternly, The aedryx have forsaken Everran. They are no longer any concern of yours.

* * * * *

It was three years—or four?—to the breaking of the spell. I do recall the season very clearly. In other times it would have been Earth-day, but the Sky-lords’ festivals had been phased out as “relics of the past,” “waste of work hours,” a “reduction in productivity.” We seemed to waste far more time and productivity in the strikes which regularly paralyzed our labor force, but I could not bring myself to care overmuch about any of it.

Nevertheless it was the day that should have been Earth-day, blazing and shaking over the dusty swell of Saphar Resh where small farmsteads now outnumbered the vines, over the distant red blur of ranges, over the city which had burst its walls, obliterated the park along Azilien, and lined the roads for five miles in every direction with the small, mean houses where those descending the social scale lived cheek by jowl with those who would one day rise.

Kastir had been away in Gebria, busy with a new irrigation project intended to bring water south from the Kemreswash. I had purposely kept clear of it. The very idea rubbed raw spots in my memory. I had had a difficult day with an Estarian “trade delegation”—which meant an unofficial mission to barter more wine at a lower price—and had retired to the tiny pleasance under what had been the hearthbard’s tower, and was now a state orphanage. From there you can see clear to the Tirien foothills and the gray Meldene olive slopes, with the line of the Helkents, like a warrior’s shield arm, ringing the south and western sky.

When Kastir appeared I summoned a smile, and he kissed my cheek as usual. But the kiss held an unusual zest. We asked about each other’s progress, of course. Superficially, we cared about each other, and I must admit we made an efficient team. But when Kastir finished with his canals and sluices, I noticed his fidgets remained.

“What is it?” I asked.

He rose and paced about. One of the foibles that did irritate me was his habit of addressing me like a public meeting, down to clearing his throat before he began. I was slouched on one seat with my feet on another, shoes off, hair twisted up anyhow for the heat. “My dear,” I remarked, somewhat acidly, “there’s only the one of me. You don’t need rhetoric here.”

He gave me a perfunctory smile and did not sit down. “I purposely kept this from you until now, Sellithar. I wanted it to be a surprise.”

There was something pathetic about his hopeful look. He had never ceased to search for the magic key that would admit us from a tepid gray world into one of color and delight, and mostly he sought it in schemes that, by improving Everran, might also be a way of pleasing me.

I could not bring myself to pour acid on that hope. I said, “I’m sure it will surprise me, dear.” Insensibly, I had drifted into addressing him as if I were the elder. Indeed, I sometimes felt it. Old as the very hills. “What is it, then?”

“I have already submitted the plans to Estar.” A familiar gleam entered his eye. Another sewerage project, I thought. “The approval was here when I returned. Whenever we like, we can start.”

“Good,” I said. “Start what?”

“For the last two years,” he continued his address, “the east has been much in my mind. I felt we had not fully exploited its potential. Certainly,” as my mouth opened, “Gebria’s population has increased tenfold, its production threefold, the new water should improve it again. But. . . .” He shrugged. “On last year’s tour, I decided to visit the Gebros towns.”

A tiny prickle of warning went down my spine. “Yes?” I said.

“I actually rode out past the border,” he said, “into Hethria. Sellithar, it’s a goldmine out there!” I had never seen Kastir display enthusiasm in my life. “Virgin soil—mostly better than Gebria’s—only wanting cultivation to blossom like a rose. Think of the grain we could produce, the sheep we could run—we could double Quarred’s wool clip inside five years. Cattle, too. They eat some kind of native weed in the rainy season, but we could import grasses—bind down the sand—improve the soil. We could farm that country for wine, fruit, silk, vegetables—we could make it the cornucopia of the Confederacy!”

My voice sounded oddly flat and loud. “How?”

“Irrigation, Sellithar.” He was positively ablaze with eagerness. “There’s a dam on Kemreswash already, my surveyors found and studied it. Inefficient, of course. We’ll build a better one, stone instead of logs, not a barrage, a wall with proper spillways, and keep all the flow instead of just a part. Then we can channel it clear down to Gebasterne. There are some channels too, they’ll have to be replaced, far too small, but we can re-use the materials. And, my dear, we have the population to practice intensive farming all over that country, on a scale beyond Estar’s own. We’ll make the place a paradise!”

I gaped at him. He did not notice. His dream had carried him away.

“No one knows the extent of Hethria, but we could probably expand indefinitely.” The glow had become a perfect beacon. “So, my dear, I laid my plans. Then I conducted surveys, made costings, ordered designs. This spring I submitted them to the Land Commission. They were delighted. We’re going to level the Gebros, Sellithar, and colonize Hethria. And we can begin right now!”

My mouth must have hung open like an empty bag. I heard myself say, faint, far and distant, “You’re going to do what?”

“Colonize Hethria. Make Everran the jewel of Estar, and ourselves. . . . Well, my dear. What do you think of my surprise?”

I goggled up at him as he stood there, the light and hope slowly dying from his face, and part of me was sorry to hurt him, when he had clearly meant to give me pleasure, part of me was reeling in bottomless consternation, and part was rigid with inexplicable fright.

He said uncertainly, “Sellithar?”

I pulled myself together. “Kastir, I don’t wish to sound ungrateful. But . . . irrigation. In Hethria. You do know that irrigation brings salt? That you have to be very careful, act with the greatest moderation, or you’ll upset the balance and sterilize the desert completely? And the balance is so delicate out there. . . .”

“Of course, I forgot you’d been there.” He sounded relieved. “It’s quite simple. Our new dam will harness the whole Kemreswash, producing so much water that even with new farms we can just wash the salt away. Chop down all those helliens, they thieve water. There’ll be plenty then. You see, my dear?”

My head reeled. I said desperately, “That isn’t right, the trees suck up the salt the water brings,” and he gave me a kind, just short of patronizing smile.

“No, no, I had my researchers study it. I can show you the figures. They prove conclusively that more water, more cultivation, will solve the entire problem, and give a return as well. Which the trees do not.”

I could not assemble an argument. The whole world had suddenly gone insane, turned upside down. I stammered, “But the Gebros—raze the Gebros. . . .”

“My dear, what earthly use is it? A monument, no more. As useless as those wretched dragon bones they’ve finally managed to bury in Gebria, and which our new Saphar scholars have already proved to be a dinosaur’s. The Gebros stone will be ideal for a score of things, the dam, the canals, the new farmsteads—”

“But the Hethox. . . .”

“They will be no problem. They never did threaten Everran. We can establish reserves for them on some of the really useless land. My dear, this is progress. Surely you can see they’ve roamed about out there, wasting natural resources, occupying valuable country, for far too long? They’re a relic, like the Gebros. It’s time Hethria came out of the past.”

He looked sure of approval, having quoted my own battlecry. Frantically I snatched the first pertinent argument to hand.

“The roads, the Sathellin . . . what will happen to our trade with Assharral?”

His face hardened. “The Sathellin. Yes. Frankly, Sellithar, I think it’s time we did do away with them. They have exploited something. They import trash at exorbitant prices, they maintain this ridiculous pretence that no one else can cross the desert; they have a monopoly on a lucrative trade that drains off wine. Wine for which we get no return.” I remembered, with a start, that Estar had recently complained of a decrease in our export of wine. “Once we settle Hethria, we can trade with Assharral for ourselves.”

“But they’re nomads, it’s their way of life! They’re free, they could never cope with settling—”

“I’m sure some arrangement can be made. After all, they are a minority group. We can hardly expect, Sellithar, to halt the march of progress, to deny so many others an improvement in the quality of life, just for a minority’s sake.”

I think I gasped. He looked enquiring. Scrabbling to avoid the thought that just so he must have described the people of Everran, I fell back on the fatuous.

“Hethria. You saw it. It’s a wild place, it shouldn’t be tampered with.” An echo in my mind threw back at me: Math is respect for That-which-is. It should not be tampered with unless you must. “Surely, Kastir, we don’t need all this expansion? We have a favorable trade balance, a stable population, no food problems, our finances are solid as a rock. . . .”

“My dear Sellithar.” He looked quite shocked. “I never thought to hear you produce such a feeble argument. Have you actually let emotion fog your wits?”

There was nowhere to go but the last ditch, so I went. “Yes, I have! You saw Hethria. Surely you realized how beautiful it is?”

He was stunned. “A howling wilderness full of rocks and sand, nomad peddlers and naked savages? It will be beautiful, I assure you. But now?”

He had seen the potential. He had not so much as glimpsed the reality. Memory burst its dam and I saw Zam accepting the cost of mending the Hethox’ delinquency, the cruelty of a langu, the wait for a flood once in five generations, the harshness of a lonely, unrewarded life spent maintaining a desert’s equilibrium. “Because that’s how Hethria is.”

And I saw what it was to me.

However I denied the memory it had been there in my mind all along, the red country, untouched, untamed, safe from the gray flood that had drowned Everran, a land of color and delight whose strength was in the very harshness from which they sprang, a citadel whose existence made my own gray world bearable. The spell I had lived under broke on a surge of protective panic so sharp it pained, the most intense emotion I had felt in three long years.

“Yes, it is beautiful!” I cried. “And I like it how it is—I don’t want it changed!”

We gaped at each other. Then he made one last attempt to bridge the rift.

“Sellithar, the plans have been approved. The funds are allotted. How can I tell Estar that it won’t be done?”

“You’ll just have to, that’s how!”

His face chilled. He said sternly, “Sellithar, I have always done my best to further your wishes, but this whim is too ridiculous. You’ve ignored the facts. You’re letting emotion run away with you.”

“No, I am not! The facts are that Hethria’s a desert with a limited population and a fragile natural balance and you can’t alter either without causing a disaster—and as for chopping down the helliens and expecting your new dam to wash the salt away, you must be out of your head!” I had never spoken so hotly in the length of our marriage, he could not believe his ears. “If you had any idea of the facts you’d never have drawn up your plans at all!”

It was done. He looked not cold but ruthless, the Estarian power-lord I suppose he had always been. You may change the livery, but not the skin.

He said without expression, “I am sorry to say this. But I am the governor of Everran. My plans for the development of Hethria have been approved. And I shall see that they go ahead.”

* * * * *

For a good while after he left my mind simply ran about like a beheaded chicken, incapable of thought. I could only feel. Fear, a frenzy of protective panic, desperate urgency to stop him at any cost, no matter how. At last I calmed enough to grow constructive, but the picture the materials presented was grim.

My first thought was Estar itself. Get the approval rescinded. I knew the methods. Feed the news-talkers, raise a pressure group, by threat or enticement enlist enough power-lords to ensure public opinion became law. But could I do it? In that trade Kastir was as adroit as I.

Moreover, he was Estarian, a palpable vantage. Further, I had never before opposed him in earnest. And he would be in earnest, I had offended him too deeply to leave a doubt. Three years had taught me that when Kastir made what he felt was a correct decision he could be formidably stubborn. And I had steeled his resolution. In addition, if I tried and failed, it would damage my standing, and possibly his. Then I should be politically impotent, not even a power behind the throne.

Divert Estar, then? Quarred would not like the idea of a new wool-producer, capable, if on paper, of doubling their clip; it would do painful things to the price. Quarred might apply sufficient pressure to make Estar think again.

And Kastir was more than capable of wrecking that strategy in the egg. He was an expert at that sort of fighting also. Far more expert than I.

Sabotage the plans themselves? Explode the salt-washing theory, refute Hethria’s potential, destroy the feasibility of the dam, prove the cost in money and manpower to be monstrous, irretrievable, pick so many holes that Estar would scrap the plan? But in logistics Kastir was more brilliant than in theory. He had taken a year to construct those plans. At every practical point they would be impregnable, and when it came to theories it would be one group of experts against another. Estar would hear what the richest promise said.

I could climb on a speaker’s stand like any other fanatic and harangue the people myself, but Kastir would defuse that too; we both knew how “the voices of the people” could be manipulated to speak their leaders’ will.

Once more panic threatened me. Alone, there was nothing I could do.

Allies, then? None in Estar strong enough to outweigh Kastir’s. In the Confederacy, Holym would not care, Hazghend would be unmanageable, Quarred, when it came to open confrontation, might back down before Estar’s overwhelming financial and numerical weight. Everran was a broken reed. The Lyngthirans? A double-edged sword. The Sathellin were a minority, the Hethox naked savages. That left. . . .

The aedryx. With the barriers down, the images flooded out: Beryx’s refusal to tamper with reality, Zam determined Hethria should not become a desolation, Moriana’s black eyes flashing at the thought of a fight. And behind them was Assharral. Surely an empire with ten provinces, all but one bigger than Everran, could outweigh Estar’s hordes?

But why consider Assharral? Use the aedryx themselves. They could force Kastir to change his mind as simply as Zam once compelled me to stand still. He himself would cancel the project, it would all be over with one quick stroke to the heart of things. . . .

Then calamity broke on me. How did I send them word?

Zam would certainly have taken my last message at face value. I was sure, with a certainty beyond reason, that he would not only shun me forever, he would never have looked for me in thought, or for Everran either. Probably he was quite ignorant of Kastir’s plans.

And would Beryx be different? At the beginning they might have made sure I did not capsize the watercart and precipitate the whole Confederacy upon them, they might—yearningly, wishfully, a small unreasonable voice persisted—have cared enough to see I came home safe. Once I married Kastir and Everran grew stable, there would be no point in surveillance. Three years had passed. They would not be looking now.

I could not sit idle, could not find an occupation to divert me, I could not think of a resourceful counselor. The only real candidate was now on the opposite side.

When that thought surfaced I got up, donned my shoes, told the cook not to keep dinner, and walked down to my mother’s house.

* * * * *

Sazan and Haskar were out, at one of the “youth rallies” I found the most obnoxious of Estarian customs, but my mother greeted me with her usual kiss and smile. After their return from Quarred our affection had first healed and then strengthened, and she could divine my feelings like no one else. We went up on the roof, where it was now cool enough to sit in the shade of the garden mulberry, and she said, “Take your shoes off, I shall. Now what’s the trouble, love?”

She had adapted so completely to her changed fortunes that it was hard to disinter any trace of the queen mother, let alone the queen. In her plain blue house dress and apron she looked no more than a brisk widowed housewife. Competent, comely, at home in her low sphere. Like Beryx she had the knack of adjusting to unpleasant reality. I did not expect her to produce a solution, even advice. All I wanted was to talk, to share the burden on my mind.

“Kastir,” I said. “He’s taken the most awful notion imaginable. He wants to colonize Hethria.”

Once started, there was no stopping it. Kastir’s plans, his misconceptions, the flaws in my counters, the threat’s imminent urgency, the cause of my opposition, the significance of Hethria, then back into the past, Zam and Beryx and Moriana and my journey for help from Assharral, it all tumbled out, right back to that idiotic dream which had led me so fatally astray.

Maddeningly, my mother was quite uninterested in the present menace or the strategic problems, not much more concerned with Assharral, and only marginally with Hethria. What she wanted to hear about was Zam. How old he was, what he looked like, how he spoke, what sort of manners he had, a score of such asinine questions, then a detailed analysis of his hypothetical character, until I said in exasperation, “Mama, Zam doesn’t matter. What matters is to stop Kastir, this time, now!”

“Salvation from the east.” She reverted to the dream, disregarding me. “I always thought it a pity they did away with the Phathos, he talked a deal of sense. And so this Zam . . . dear me, That, such a peculiar name, however did he come by such a thing, I shall never get used to it—but no matter.” There was a gleam in her eye that I knew all too well.

“Mama! You’re not to go making cock-and-bull plans, I absolutely forbid you! The Phathos was talking about Everran, and it’s all irrelevant now. And I’m married, and I mean to stay that way!”

“Marriages can be annulled,” she said with that blithe, hair-raisingly immoral commonsense she sometimes showed. “I was never very fond of Kastir, to tell the truth—”

“Mama, will you stop it! You talk as if—I am married and I’m perfectly happy. Anyway, he’s an aedr and a monster and I wouldn’t look at him if he were the last man on earth and—and—I told him I never wanted to see his face again.” Infuriatingly, idiotically, my voice wobbled. “That’s not the point. The point is that I have to find a way to save Hethria, and I have to do it now!”

“But I thought we already decided, love? Just tell your That and he can settle everything.”

“He is not my That!” I all but bellowed. “He belongs to Hethria, not to me!”

In the denial, I recognized truth. My face must have altered, and she read its message, for she abandoned frivolity.

“Very well, love.” She went to the heart of it with her startling ability to talk arrant nonsense, pay no apparent heed to the relevant factors, then produce a devastatingly accurate analysis. “You can’t do it by yourself, and it is his country, and if he is a wizard he should be capable of saving it. You just have to tell him. It’s the only thing you can do.”

“But I can’t.” I heard my voice go flat. “After what I said to him. . . . Anyway, I can’t get a message through. To any of them.”

“Nonsense,” she said briskly. She had aged very little, her hair was still tawny gold, but now her gray eyes sparkled in that barely lined face. “Once you make up your mind, you’ll find a way. As for insulting him, it’s good for men occasionally. Keeps them in their place.”

* * * * *

Apart from driving me crazy, she did clarify my thoughts. By the time I reached the palace, I was sure my only hope was the aedryx. Before I was out of the bath, I knew there was no physical way to warn them in time. The Sathellin might carry a message, but they had to receive it, the messengers would have to locate Zam, who might be anywhere, by caravan even Assharral was three months away. And knowing Kastir, I was sure his plans would be under way long before. I almost gave in. My mother’s words prevented me. I had to find a way.

I was in bed when it came to me. Scarthe. Mindspeech. No need for the Sathellin. I could tell Zam directly, mind to mind.

For a moment I faltered. That parting message of mine had been so fierce, so final, it would be more than humiliating to reverse.

I reminded myself that this was for Hethria, I was a wholly disinterested party, bent on saving a country by enlisting the only possible ally, it was not for his sake at all, it was for his land. The land, I amended. Sitting up in bed, I took a deep breath, and thought: Zam.

There was no reply.

At first I told myself it was understandable, if not laudable, that rancor should delay his reply. Then that the chances of his reading anyone’s thoughts, particularly mine, over a few short minutes, were astronomical, then that I had to keep trying, there was no alternative; then that if they did it so could I; then that the strength of my distress must surely get through.

Around midnight, I conceded defeat. Zam had said he and Zem “had the aptitude, but the skills have to be learnt.” On the evidence, it was reasonable to assume that hearing was an aptitude, but speech a skill. He might speak to me. I could not open a conversation with him.

Despair saw me off to sleep. Strangely enough, I woke with stiffened resolution, and almost at once had an idea.

Zam had put out that fire in the torjer grass, so it was reasonable to assume he would watch for other fires. He would use farsight in Hethria, if not in Everran. If I went out into Hethria, and lit a big enough fire, he would eventually notice it, with eye or mind. He would see who had lit it. And surely, with his attention caught, I could somehow get the message through?

But I was in Saphar, with Hethria half the country’s length away.

It took till breakfast to solve that one, and longer to accept the solution. I have always loathed deception, from lies to political chicanery. More especially deception involving hypocrisy, and most of all, hypocrisy that involves kith and kin.

I sat over the table, twisting the strands of my undressed hair. Then half of my mind interrogated the other half. Are you in earnest or aren’t you? Do you want to save Hethria or not?

Feeling somewhat as Harran must have, if, as the songs say, he did go to parley with the dragon, I dressed and went to find Kastir.

* * * * *

He was naturally in his workroom. He received me with a courtesy somewhat chillier than usual, but by good luck all his scribes were elsewhere. I said at once, “I’m sorry, my dear, to have been so disappointing last night. It must have been the heat, or my being tired. Shall we discuss it again? Or do you have some plans that I can see?”

His face lit up, so instead of feeling guilty I felt positively abominable. “I knew you could never remain deaf to reason,” he said, in the nearest Kastir could come to joy. “It would have been beneath you. Completely out of character. Now, let me show you. . . .”

He jumped up and began to unroll designs, blueprints, maps, cost-sheets, schedules, all over the work-table, talking away in the highest animation, with most of it going past my ears. I was scanning the stuff from a quite different view.

It was terrifying how accurate my guesses had been. On a practical level the plans were not only waterproof, they were fireproof. I could not fault them. Moreover, I had not underestimated their level of readiness. We could literally start whenever we liked.

“In fact”—he looked somewhat bashful—“last night, I intended asking you to come with me to Penhazad. If we had left today, we could have seen the first block down from the Gebros. The foundation stone, one might say.”

My heart stopped. He had looked fondly back to the plans, so he missed whatever might have been in my face.

Reverting to childhood, I thought, Surely the Four cannot sanction wickedness? Yet it had come uncannily pat. If I wanted to reach Hethria, the means was in my hand. All I had to do was prolong my deceit.

It seemed an eternity I wavered. Then I set my teeth. Gebasterne would have been better, Zam had said he warded Hathria’s south, but I could not pick and choose, any more than I could indulge in scruples. There was frantic need for haste.

“If it comes to that,” I said airily, “we could still leave today.” I had to justify myself. “With a project so big, I think we ought to supervise all we can in person. You know what workmen are. Even your budget won’t stand much pilfering on this workforce’s scale.”

“Splendid!” It was actually an exclamation. “Sellithar, it will crown this moment to have you there.”

He kissed my hand, and somehow, I drove down my self-loathing and managed to produce a smile.

* * * * *

Instead of using the old highway from Astil to Kelflase, and then along the Kelf down to the Kemreswash, we rode directly northeast from Astil by the maze of secondary roads which serviced new farms in the formerly deserted heart of Gebria. And still the way to Penhazad was too long for me.

To make it worse, Kastir was positively affectionate, requiring me to endorse my duplicity every second hour with discussion and consultation upon some doubtful aspect of the plans, and hopes and dreams for our future as well as Hethria’s. My nerves were in rags when we crossed the last flat tilt of Gebrian ridges, stitched by wretched little holdings where optimistic migrants hoed among the stones, and ahead rose the gray walls of Penhazad, the pale hostile distances of Lyngthira, and between them, the serpentine labyrinth of muted green, dull black and duller gray trees, twisted channels, claypans and drytime waterholes, which comprise the Kemreswash.

There was no time for recuperation. The Gebros demolition crews had been hired, imported and waiting for a month, the gear was to hand, the arrangements made. They had only wanted Kastir’s presence to begin. Next day, in the baking summer desert heat, crews and populace assembled, flags were hung out, speeches made. A band struck up “Forward, Estarians,” and a pallid, fiercely concentrating foreman gave me a ribbon-bedizened pick and assisted me up the scaffolding to the crest of the Gebros, where I would strike the ceremonial commencement blow.

With the pick in my hand I looked back into Everran, banners and gaudy clothes and sweaty excited faces, Kastir beaming from the shade of our temporary dais. Penhazad’s walls were sunk in new houses, the roll of Gebria’s ridges scratched or trodden or built upon as far as I could see. I looked down at the stone under my feet.

Big square paneled blocks of Saeverran granite, they had been cut and sledged and slung up here by the workmen of the second Berheage, seven kings before Beryx’s reign. In its way, what I stood on was a legend too.

I had a brief urge to fling my pick into the crowd, assume a heroic stance and bawl, “In the name of the past, I forbid this!” Quickly, I looked away into Hethria.

The Sathellin roads hardly notched that wide-planed emptiness that stretched away to the horizon, serrated by the first sand-belt’s distant dunes, almost obliterated by the heat-haze, so it all shivered savagely in a crystalline blur of air. Within that perimeter the land was rough and resolutely defiant, gibber-patches, forlorn desert oaks and clumps of istarel bush whose meager greens could not mask the soil beneath. It stared unblinkingly back at me, the raw Helkent color, one shade from the hue of freshly butchered meat. A live color, live as blood. I had the oddest fancy that it was not in Everran, with its swarming multitudes, but out there in the emptiness that the earth truly lived.

There was no time for fancies either. Not if I hoped to carry out my plan.

The pick produced a tiny spurt of stone-dust. The crowd cheered, the band brayed even louder, the now beaming foreman helped me down while the first shift raced each other up the scaffolding. Hammers, chisels, levers came into play. The chantyman struck up, on his flute, an old Everran building song, probably the one that heard the block hove into place. There was a pause; a quick heave, a rush of motion. And from the far side of the wall a heavy, echoless thud.

I had no heart to watch the next one go. Reaching Kastir, I said, “My dear, it was so hot up there, I believe I’ll rest a while. Perhaps, later on, I’ll take a ride down Kemreswash. I may even,” archly, “find a better site for your dam.”

Kastir was all solicitude. “And perhaps,” he agreed indulgently, “so you might.” I rested a token quarter of an hour. Then, taking advantage of the town holiday to conceal my strangely early departure, I rode under the deserted gate arch and back into Hethria.

© 2008 Sylvia Kelso

First published by FiveStar Books

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

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