And Yannul was an impressive man. The Amanackire woman had pleased the Olmish refugees, who paid her instant reverence. Safca was more able to accept this herself. Medaci reminded her somewhat of the Lowlander she had known, though they were very unlike in all things but coloring, and even that was not really the same. The guardian’s daughter did not mention the one named Ashni. It did not seem yet the time.
When eventually Yannul said, “You did so much, risked so much on the strength of a dream?” Safca challenged him across the fire: “Lord Yannul, so did you.”
His fine eyes fell. He looked tired and lined under his splendor.
“And I seem still to be doing it.”
He felt himself a faint distrust of Safca, an antagonism. He did not know what it was. She seemed honest, if impassioned, and had shown him so much honor he smiled.
Later, curled up with Medaci under an invented tent, he said, “Anack used to be a goddess of peace. Then She was a wargoddess. Now She instructs women to take up hairpins and knives and kill with them.”
Medaci shivered, and he was sorry. He was all too conscious that, in avoiding the phantoms of the Shadowless Plains, they had entered a situation uncannily similar. Olm, too, had slain its occupying garrison, and now sought to hide in a ruin. But then Medaci said, “That was Safca’s interpretation. So it was interpreted to us by Raldnor, in the past. To meet the sword with the sword. Perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps it’s another way Anackire shows us, but we never see it.”
He thought she fell asleep then, but after a while she said, “There was a story my grandmother told me, why the goddess is depicted with eight arms instead of two arms.”
“I’d heard it was from the spider,” he said. “Eight-armed, because the female spider is greater than the male.”
“No,” she said, laughing a little. He was glad of her laugh. “The story is this. An innocent came by chance into a grove on the Plains and found Anackire seated there. Being an innocent, he was not afraid, and the goddess was kind. They talked and presently he asked Her why, in Her statues, She was shown as eight-armed, seeing She was before him in the grove with only two arms. And Anackire replied: ‘It is because you are innocent that you see me in such a way. But the statues are carven by men who have seen me through other eyes.’ Then the innocent apologized, saying he didn’t understand her. Anackire answered, ‘My words you do not understand. My Self you do.’”
Yannul lay a long time, holding her, listening to the small noises of the exhausted camp. What she had said grew warm and drifting. Again he thought she slept, until she murmured, “Lur Raldnor.” But then she did sleep, and he soon slept, and forgot.
Five days along the pass, having negotiated fallen boulders, crawled through apertures, climbed over tremendous rock heaps, coaxing or forcing the zeebas and what livestock remained to them, they came out on an open platform of stone and were able to look down the long fraught way they had already come. It had not been an auspicious day. One of the unstable slips they had had to climb had tilted. A man was flung into a ravine below the pass. Although they had got the zeebas free, the cart had slithered after him, laden with flour and salted meat. At least, they did not scream as they fell. The man’s wife kept up for several miles the high desolate keening that might be used to mark death, until Safca, walking back to her on blistered feet, had reasoned grief to silence.
When fires were lit at dusk on the platform of stone, some Olmians looked down across the stony sides below. They were even able to make out the flank of the first mountain they had scaled. Before too long, they were also able to make out the many campfires spread along the entry to the pass.
“Karmians,” said Yannul.
The Lan who had been an officer in the Olmish palace guard, next a levy recruit, now a captain of this unmilitary march, considered. “They’re five days behind us.”
“They’re also lighter. We’ve got children, women, beasts, baggage. I’ve had dealings with a man who served Kesarh Am Karmiss. He said little, but his reactions were eloquent. If I were in Kesarh’s army, I wouldn’t want to let him down, either.”
They resumed progress two hours before dawn.
Yannul consulted the Zorish girl who was their guide. She was a strange creature, with black whiplike hair—snakelike hair, as her movements were snakelike. The Karmians had butchered her snake at Olm from superstitious dislike. One heard, the snakepits were gone from the temples of Istris. Very little was known of a Zor dancer’s relation with the serpent partner, but it had long been accepted among scholars as a spiritual one. The snake could be a familiar, conceivably a friend. The girl was full of wordless anger and woe, and this added to the difficulties of stilted speech. The Zor spoke the Vis tongue, but wound into some older or parallel language, its accent more appealing but less understandable than the guttural slur of Ommos, Zakoris or Alisaar. To make matters worse, the girl had never seen her own land. Her mother bore her in Lan and taught her there the snake dance. Though she knew of the passes, Vashtuh had never used them, until now.
“The upper pass, do you remember how far it should be, Vashtuh?”
“Ten days, and then ten days,” she said. Or he thought she did.
“How do we find it?”
“A cave. Through the mountain.”
It rained. The rain turned to hail, daggers flashing through the air, striking starbursts of pallid fire from the sides of the mountains that now went up sheer to either side of them. Sometimes stones fell, causing minor abrasions and substantial panic.
They knew the Karmian detachment was behind them, knowing them to be ahead, though the route curved—it was no longer feasible for one group to glimpse the other.
Moving almost constantly now, they realized, however, the Karmians would have encroached on the separating distance.
The Lannic officer organized fifty men who were willing to block the pass, delaying the pursuit, maybe annihilating it. They approached Yannul, who had the diplomacy himself to approach Safca. “We saw the Karmian campfires,” he said to her, “those we could see. Fifty-one men will hold the pass for fifteen minutes. And they’ll be fifty-one men we’ve lost.”
She accepted him as counselor and with his personality to back her, refused the others leave to act.
On the twenty-third day, worn out, some sick, all sick at heart, and the hail again smashing about them, there was no evidence of the cave Vashtuh had said signaled the higher pass. Only the rock walls going up sheer, the somber peaks beyond, no longer blue, and the memory of Kesarh’s men on the road behind them.
Shortly after dawn on the twenty-fourth day there was a new mountain, directly in their path. A stone-slip had come down there, probably the year before, dislodged by snow. There was no way round it, no way up or over it. The only use it would serve would be to put their backs to when the Karmians arrived.
“I had a dream,” said Yannul’s younger son. “I saw the other side of the mountain. There’s a huge valley. It must be the Zor. It must mean we’ll find a way through.”
Yannul did not say anything. He could only have said, “That’s the closest you’ll come to it, now.” He had other things on his mind. He was wondering if, in the final extremity, he should kill them, his wife and son, to save them from atrocities the Karmians might inflict. One did not hear of such atrocities too often, save from Free Zakoris. The Amanackire were sacred. But maybe not here, where none but Karmians would live to tell of it. Kesarh had ousted Ashara-Anack from eminence in the fanes of Istris. Besides, Yannul recollected the burning village the caravan had negotiated. No, the Amanackire might not be sacred here.