“Shadry needs wood and water in the kitchen,” I said. “When he’s done with you, I want those drainage ditches below the stable cleaned out. They’re fouled again—I can smell them from here. Tikat’s to help you, if he plans to spend another night under any roof of mine. As for your plans”—and I bounced one off the point of his elbow that left my hand sore all that day—“next time, don’t let them hang on someone else’s yes or no. Next time, you’d best keep running as straight and far as you can go, for I’ll pulp every last drop of cider out of you if you try sneaking back. Do you understand what I am telling you, boy?”
He didn’t, not then. He gave me one dark, puzzled blink, and then ducked past me toward the woodshed. I shouted after him, “Stay away from the old man, do you hear me? And the girl, too—I don’t want you speaking a bloody word to that mad girl.” When I turned, because I felt someone watching me, it was the fox, grinning between the withes of a berry basket. He was gone, vanished, while my shout for Gatti Jinni was still echoing, but I know I saw him. I saw him, all right.
NYATENERI
Lal said, “I’m sorry you don’t like my singing. I don’t care, but I am sorry.”
We were walking the horses by then, letting the little Mildasi black lead, packhorse or not, because he understood this country: hardly a stone spurted backward under his feet, while our poor larger beasts flailed their way up the path like men floundering through a snowstorm. I said, “I never complained about your voice; it’s what you sing that I can’t abide. No tune, no shape, no end—just an everlasting melancholy whine quavering in my skull day after day. Meaning no mockery, this is truly what your folk call music?”
My horse flung back his head and balked, having winded the rock-targ I smelled a moment later. There’s no high range without them, not north of the Corun Beg, anyway. I spent the next few minutes reassuring him that it was dead scent from a last-year’s lair, which I certainly hoped was true. Lal waited for me a little way ahead. “So they do,” she answered me, “and history, too, and poetry and genealogy, for the matter of that. Ride on ahead if it troubles you to hear. Or sing something yourself—there would be an interesting change. Even Lukassa sings now and then, and I’ve often heard Rosseth humming about his chores, only the gods know why. Never you.”
“The air is thin here,” I said. “I save my breath for breathing.” We were four days out and up among the mountains above Corcorua, on a road that tacked constantly back and forth, as Lal said, like a boat trying to find the wind, at times veering three and four and five miles sidewise to climb less than one. For all that, we had scrambled high enough already to look down on the backs of coasting snowhawks, high enough that the foothills among which we had first sought our master looked as flat and pale as the farmlands they surveyed. The air was indeed thin, and chill, too, full summer or no, with a curious tang about it, rather like fruit about to go bad. Above us, the icy peaks leaned together, breathing grayness.
“To me, singing is breathing,” Lal said over her shoulder as we started on. “I don’t understand people who don’t sing.” She had been in a sideways quarrelsome mood since we set out—longer, really—never giving her disquiet proper voice, but neither allowing us a truly easy moment, even in silence. There are many who find deep contentment in such a situation, but Lal was not of them—I have known no one less comfortable with the common subtleties. Anger she could enjoy well enough; deviousness, never. I halted my horse a second time and stood where I was until she turned, hearing no one trudging behind.
“Are we no more to be companions, then?” I asked her. “Because of what occurred between weary and lonely friends who had endured much together, is there to be no friendship ever again between you and me?” My life has not led me easily to ask such questions, nor Lal’s taught her to answer them, and she did not. She said only, so low that I could barely hear her, “We must reach Simburi Pass by sunset.” This time she did not look back to see if I were following.
We did reach Simburi Pass—substantial name for what amounts to a goatherd’s trail up to summer grazing, hardly wider than the stream where we made our camp. We spoke little until the horses were seen to, and then we sat down and faced each other across a shallow pit in which a hundred or a thousand generations of goatherds must have built their cooking fires. Lal said presently, “Where do you think he picked up our track?”
“Trodai,” I said. “That place like a bit of lichen on a bit of stone, where we asked too many people if they knew of a river in these mountains. He caught up at Trodai.”
Lal shook her head. “You do yourself an injustice. No one’s taken that overgrown old path out of Corcorua in centuries, I’m sure of it. You gave us a day’s start with that, maybe two. He found us no earlier than last night or this morning.”
“What difference? Either way, at least we can have a fire. I’m tired of sleeping cold and going without my tea for his benefit. I’ll gather some wood—you see if there might not be a few fish in that stream.”
I started to rise, but Lal seized my arm and pulled me back, crying, “Fool, get down! Even Rosseth wouldn’t stand like that against the sunset!” The Mildasi horse, reacting to the furious panic in her tone, made a strange low sound in its throat, less a nicker than a questioning growl.
My laughter plainly offended Lal, but I couldn’t help that. “If he were within bowshot, and I think he is, he could have picked us off long ago. I told you, they never use weapons of any sort—it’s one-third religion, two-thirds a question of pride. Now that he is alone, he might strike from ambush, but I doubt it.” I stood up, deliberately raising my voice. “The one trouble with knowing that an armed warrior facing your bare hands is overmatched is that it leads to a certain vanity, a certain carelessness. That is exactly why his friends are dead. That is why he will join them in a while.”
I took Lal’s hands and she came up in a single motion, as I have seen her flow out of a sound sleep, swordcane half-drawn before her eyes were fully open. Now they were wary, probing: suspicious, but not altogether untrusting. My life has hung often on knowing that particular difference. I said, “I will find the wood. If we die tonight, it won’t be on salt meat and stale bread.”
There were fish, small but plentiful, and very tasty. Lal lay flat and scooped them out of the water as the sheknath do, and I cooked them crisp in oil and a bit of our precious flour. We had darit-root still, which keeps well and clears the mouth, and there was even a winter apple we had forgotten about. Lal made the tea, just as my Man Who Laughs had taught me to make it, as he surely taught every student he ever had. It is not a common blend; sometimes I fancy that I’ve surely left as plain a spoor of tea-leaves across two continents as any following killer could wish, and one far less escapable than my sex. Nothing much to be done about it now.
With those mountains toppling over us, we finished our supper in darkness. Our small fire was warm enough, but it threw its light no further than the horses’ glinting eyes. There was no scent of rock-targ now, and no sound but the soft jingle of the stream. I said, “First watch to me.”
“We should set out the bima sticks. They’d give us some warning, anyway.”
“No, they wouldn’t. Believe me.” Lal met my eyes, nodded, and shrugged. I said, “He has no interest in you. I am all he’s after.”
“And suppose he gets me by mistake, what then? It’s chance and stupidity that keep me awake, not any fanatical assassins. I really fear a stupid death.” It is often hard to tell when Lal is joking.