He nodded toward a group of the Pirate delegates hovering nearby, translator at the ready, waiting to pounce. How much could they hear?
“This is serious,” Maja said clearly. “I have word from Talagh….”
She lowered her voice.
“I’ve been talking to Syndic Blrundahlrgh,” she said, and told them about it.
“Well, Striclan?” said Ribek, when she’d finished.
“They’re both very good points. In fact I’d been thinking about them myself.”
“We haven’t got the authority to commit the Empire to anything.”
“We’ll have to talk to Chanad,” said Saranja.
“At least I can go and start doing something about the Ice-dragon,” said Ribek. “Odd that that’s the only thing about yesterday’s performance that wasn’t hocus-pocus, and now you’re asking me to say that it was.”
He rose and moved away, as if just easing his limbs. The inquisitors pounced. Maja watched him as he answered their questions. His body language was easy, nonchalant, almost amused. He was actually enjoying himself, she realized. Saranja was right. Impossible man!
“You know,” said Saranja, “we’re going to have to visit Lady Kzuva on the way home, and tell her.”
“Oh, can we? Please!” said Maja.
That was the last vivid moment. Darkness swallowed her. The magical turmoil of becoming a mugal had already been almost too much for her, without the strain of trying to think and act and speak like Lady Kzuva. Yesterday she’d been able to let Lady Kzuva do it herself, while Maja had watched what happened from inside her, almost like a bystander.
She drifted up into consciousness. Where…? What…? She seemed to be lying on something soft, like a pile of cushions. Mutters from around and above her, anxious, vaguely impatient. Her whole body was full of aches and pains, but why didn’t they really hurt any more?
“I think she’s coming round. Lady Kzuva…”
Striclan. Oh yes, of course. The mugal. The conference. The refreshment tent.
“I’m all right,” she whispered. “Help me up. I must set my seal…. Where’s my cane?”
“Easy, easy…” Striclan again. “Everything’s ready. There’s no hurry.”
They must have carried her into the conference tent. She could remember the sharp smell of the burning wax, watching the purple drops dribble onto the parchment, somebody holding her quivering hand steady and helping it press the seal ring firmly down into the glistening pool. Then darkness again.
She had woken in the evening—the next evening, Saranja told her later—in her own body, lying in a warm and comfortable bed. Her hand was clutching something under the pillow. She pulled it out, forced her eyes open and looked at it blearily. It was the brooch with the single tree.
PART FOUR
KZUVA
CHAPTER
26
Dreamily, lulled by the hiss of the passing air and the rhythmic boom of the tireless wings, Maja watched the landscape stream away beneath them as the horses bore them north. She thought they’d seen a lot of the Empire on their long, slow journey south, but realized now that it had been almost nothing beside the things she would never now see.
That craggy range of hills with a great gorge running through, for instance, every cliff festooned with battlements and walls protecting what should have been a series of mighty citadels, but in fact holding no more than a few stone cottages with steep red roofs, piled almost on top of each other where they clung to the rock above the foaming water.
Benayu, after a week’s rest at Larg, was stronger physically, but still seemed dazed and faraway, coming to terms with himself, perhaps, in the same way he had done on their first journey north from Larg. Maja, relishing her recovery of her extra sense, hadn’t asked him to renew her shielding. So now she could tell that the costly-seeming fortifications had been built centuries ago by magic. But why here, and to what end? And how did the people who dwelt there now earn their living in such a seemingly barren place?
A yellow plain, featureless apart from one large dark patch like cloud-shadow. But the sky was cloudless, and above the patch, and nowhere else, forty or fifty huge birds circled. As the horses drew nearer Maja saw that the patch was an enormous herd of animals, several thousand of them. Antelopes? Wild cattle? And the birds vultures, hovering for prey? None of these, for as Maja watched three of the creatures below detached themselves from the main body and she could see that they were also birds, each the size of a pony, but flightless, with puny little wings. A moment later one of those circling overhead plummeted down and drove the strays back to join the main mass; then the rest of the flying ones seemed to notice the intruders’ approach and flew shrieking toward them. Saranja, riding on that flank with Striclan pillion, shouted a warning and swung Rocky away. Benayu and Ribek followed. Sponge dropped back as rear-guard, snarling over his shoulder. The birds, soon outpaced, turned back to their guardianship.
Then for a while they followed a river winding through a forest, fold after fold of tree-covered hills as far as the eye could see. Stretches of glassy-still water alternated with foaming rapids. Close above one of these, two massive chains had been stretched from bank to bank to hold two lines of rafts steady against the current. There were people on the rafts, wearing the normal bright-colored dress of the Empire. Each of the women on the upstream line carried a large gourd, from which she was steadily sprinkling small handfuls of what looked like some kind of seed onto the water where it flowed between the rafts. The rafts immediately above the rapids were spaced further apart so that the men on them could thrash the surface into foam with implements like flails. The foam was brilliant orange, which persisted all the way down the rapids until it was lost in the stillness of the pool below.
In the middle of a clearing beside the pool a boy about six years old, naked apart from a small gold crown, was sitting on an ornate throne watching the tumbling water. Either side of him a dozen yellow-robed men—priests, perhaps—stood with their spread hands raised in front of them as if they were causing the color change. None of the laborers above the rapids had even glanced up as the winged horses passed above them, so intent were they on their task. For a moment it looked as if the priests would also ignore the intrusion into their ritual, but then one of them shouted and pointed and they broke rank and rushed into the trees, stumbling over their robes as they ran. The boy remained, staring steadfastly at the sunset-colored rapids.
“What on earth was happening there?” said Maja. “It wasn’t magic. At least I couldn’t feel any.”
“We’ll never know now,” said Ribek cheerfully.
“No, we’ll never know now. Never.”
“We could go back and ask, I suppose. Only I doubt they’d be friendly, judging by the way those fellows bolted into the trees.”
“We’d be doing it all the time. Going back and asking, I mean. There’s so much. It was better on the road. There was time.”
“You want to get down and walk? You aren’t in a hurry to get back to the Valley?”
“Not specially, not for me. I know you’ve got to, because the horsemen will be going back to their wives and families before the passes close, and then you can sing to the snows and stop them coming back next year.”
“Assuming it works again. Won’t know till I’ve tried.”
“You’ve seen the Ice-dragon. And Saranja’s got Zald. It’ll be all right. This time, anyway. And Benayu wants to get back to his sheep, and Saranja’s got to sort out about what happens to Woodbourne and see what everybody wants done about the forest…”