“Nice of you, but I must get back,” said Ribek. “Harvest’s later up north, of course, but they’ll already be behind with the milling.”
“Us too,” said Saranja. “We don’t feel right, taking all that money off Lady K and then swanning off to deal with our own affairs. We want to get it all settled.”
(Lady Kzuva had characteristically insisted on paying Saranja her salary from the date of her commission, and Striclan for a year in advance. Ribek got a lump sum to compensate for his loss of earnings in the service of the Empire—as much, he said, as he’d have earned in ten years’ milling. Imperial coin wasn’t any use in the Valley, so he got gold. There was a leaving bonus for her boy Bennay, as large as if he’d held that post for sixty years, and for Maja what seemed to her a monstrous amount of plain spending money.)
“Ah, food,” exclaimed Ribek. “Nothing like mountain air for a healthy appetite.”
The dishes assembled themselves neatly on the turf. The five sat in a circle and passed them round.
“I got second helpings for all of us,” said Benayu.
The silence of contentment fell, until Ribek broke it with a sigh.
“You know,” he said, “I think there’s only one thing I regret in all our journeyings. I feel we didn’t do right by the Magister at Barda. All right, he was—is, I hope—a pompous ass, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he was a good man who did his best for us. And the Watchers came, and we ran away and left him in deep trouble. I hope he came out all right.”
“Want me to look?” said Benayu. “…No, he isn’t at Barda—they’ve got a new Magister. Wait…Ah…He’s still alive…He’s been in prison in Talagh, but they’ve let them all out now that the Watchers are gone. He’s lost about half his weight. He’s trying to get back to Barda but he hasn’t got any money. Shall we just send him some? He’ll wake up and find it in his pocket.”
“He was sad that he’d never seen the mountains,” said Maja.
“And here we are eating oyster-and-bacon pie,” said Saranja. “His oyster-and-bacon pie, good as.”
“All right,” said Benayu. “And Ribek can say sorry to him for all of us.”
Again that momentary absence, the blip of made magic, and a ragged, unrecognizable figure stood beside them, staring bewildered at the snow-capped mountain range running away north and the immense landscape below it. He seemed not even to have noticed their presence on the turf beside him.
Another blip, and his tatters became clean, well-fitting clothes. He must have felt the change for he looked down at himself and ran his spread hands over his body, feeling the quality of the cloth. His right hand bumped against something in a pocket. He felt and pulled out a purse and weighed it in his hand. It was clearly heavy.
Suddenly he raised his head and sniffed. A dribble of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth.
“Oyster-and-bacon pie, Magister?” said Ribek. “We’re delighted to see you again, after all the troubles we brought upon you.”
The Magister started at the voice, looked at Ribek and stared at them each in turn.
“Dreaming?” he whispered. “Dead? Heaven? Oyster-and-bacon pie?”
“No, you’re in the real world, Magister. Please sit down and taste some pie to prove it. Oysters from Barda, and there’s nothing else like them, not even in heaven. I’m sure you remember us, if not necessarily with pleasure. Saranja, Maja, Benayu and me, Ribek Ortahlsohn. You haven’t met Striclan, though.”
“My dear sirs! My dear ladies! Barda oysters! I thought I should never taste them again. And the mountains, which I was never destined to see!”
Trembling, he sat. Benayu heaped his plate, filled his goblet and gave them to him. He ate slowly, in silence, savoring every mouthful, while they told him their story and why they had treated him as they did.
“The mountains of the north,” he whispered as he put his plate down. “The heroes who saved the Empire! With my help! With my help! And the oysters of Barda!”
Gentle magic flowed and he fell asleep. It flowed again, and he vanished from the hillside.
“His heirs are squabbling over his estate,” said Benayu. “So his house is still empty. He’ll wake in his own bed.”
Maja woke somewhere in the depths of the night and lay gazing at the friendly stars of the North. There was the old Fisherman, with his rod bending under the weight of the Fish, so that its tip pointed directly at the Axle-pin. At Barda they had all been out of sight. At Larg he had been half hidden, and the Axle-pin just below the horizon, with the Fish still farther down. Now, at last, here they all were, shining above the glistening snow-peaks.
The others seemed to be asleep. Ribek was only a couple of paces away. Striclan and Saranja lay further off, snug in their shared bedding; Benayu was even further away, so that the persistent buzz of his powers didn’t disturb Maja’s dreams.
She and Ribek could have been alone together on the hillside. He was a heavy sleeper. If she were to slip out of her own bedding and ease herself in beside him, he probably wouldn’t even notice. It was only a whimsy, a fancy, but unwilled it bred the longing. A desire. A physical ache. What’s the harm in that? whispered her body.
She wasn’t going to do it, of course. It wouldn’t be fair to him. But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was astonished, frightened, by the sudden power of the demand. Night after night they had slept almost within reach of each other. Night after night she had dozed off during another episode of her fantasy life at Northbeck. Naturally, being husband and wife in the fantasy, they slept in the same bed, but she had spent no time imagining the experience. It was just a detail, a way of making the fantasy as real as possible, like the stuffed owl on the kitchen shelf.
Now, without warning, it was central to the fantasy. Nothing could have any reality without it. And it still wouldn’t work unless Ribek felt the same about her. She had no doubt at all that he would one day. But when? They’d talked about it a bit in his dream when she’d been a rag doll in that other universe. When she was six years older, she’d suggested. He’d said ten, but that had just been haggling. Now, lying under the stars on the mountainside, feeling what she was feeling, even six years seemed a wilderness of waiting. Surely four would be enough. Or three, if she coaxed Benayu into giving her a love charm.
And then, what would he feel after…? There’d been a farmer who’d liked girls Maja’s age. He must have done something with one of them, because Ribek thought he would have been better dead and had told him to take his wheat elsewhere for grinding. For a vivid moment she seemed to see the shadowy cavern of the wheel-room at Northbeck mill, the great wheel slowly churning round, the white water tumbling over the scoops, and dark against that the shape of a man dangling by his neck from a rope tied round one of the beams.
In that moment she made up her mind. She wasn’t going back to Northbeck with him. Even one night there would make it harder to leave him, and harder and harder every night that passed. Benayu had had powers enough to fetch the Magister from Talagh and send him south to Barda. He would find it a simple matter, surely, to send Maja back to Lady Kzuva.
Tomorrow she would start her new life.
Life without Ribek.
The words whispered in her mind, desolate, the sigh of a wandering spirit lost in a wilderness. Silently she breathed them between her lips, and again, and yet again, over and over, like a charm to help her get used to the idea. Gradually her whole mood changed. For a while she simply lay there feeling more and more deeply at peace. Then she found herself beginning to imagine what her new life would be like, in a great house full of people, or on the road with Lady Kzuva’s entourage, speeding along the sections of the Highways set aside for grandees, or in the mighty and mysterious city of Talagh.