LAL
I never sensed him behind me, not once, but the Mildasi horse did. As long as those shaggy black ears stayed back and those scarlet nostrils kept flaring and rumbling, I kept moving upriver in the dying light.
The trap we were laying was so childishly obvious that we could only count on our pursuer’s dismissing it out of hand as a blind to cover our true deadfall. We had expected him to track me some distance, against the off chance that I really might double back to ambush him. But it would seem far more likely—or so we hoped—that I might be trying to lure him away from Nyateneri, and he could never afford the greater risk of his quarry actually escaping on some lashed-together heap of floating debris. He would turn back before I dared and reach Nyateneri well before me. Exactly how well was my responsibility.
When the black’s behavior finally told me that we were no longer being trailed, it was past sunset and I had lost sight of the Susathi. I had held to its course as closely as I could, but the further I traveled, the more impassable the bank became for a rider, and I was forced steadily away into brambles and sword-grass, and so into the trees. I could not even smell the river now.
I dismounted, unsaddled and unburdened the horses, and loaded myself with whatever would not slow me. Then I took the beasts’ heads between my hands, each in turn, saying certain words, and told them that they were free to follow me back down the river or not, as they chose, and that the Mildasi black would be their leader and bring them safely to kindness and good grazing. My friend taught me always to do this when forced to abandon horses. What use it may be to them, I cannot say, but I have always done it, just so.
Hard going it was at first in the wild old tree-dark, on a path that only my three horses had trodden before me. There were mossy roots to stumble over, thorny creepers to snatch at my legs, and a sickly weight in the air that sometimes forced me to stand still for too long, my heart pounding absurdly and my mind unfamiliar. In those moments, nothing would stay in focus, not even Nyateneri’s peril, which became infinitely less real than the dimmest of my old dreams. I did not then know what was happening to me, and that frightened me as nothing waiting in the woods or on the river shore could ever have done. Madness is my enemy, not wizards or assassins.
I lost the path twice, and nearly my swordcane as well—a vine twitched it neatly out of my belt, leaving me to scrabble wildly through brush and leaf-mold in the dark—but I did find my way back to the Susathi at last. No moon yet, but better than the moon is the long summer twilight of the north that turns clouds to a pale gold-violet that exists nowhere else, and riverbank reeds to glowing shadows. Compared to the woods, it was brightest noon, and I slung my boots around my neck and settled down to running with great relief.
I am a good runner. There are many faster, but not so many for whom it has been as necessary to learn to become nothing but flight. Even with boots and saddlebags bouncing heavily over my shoulders, I covered the same ground in less time than I had on horseback with two other horses to mind. No other sound but my breath and the river, much louder now in the evening stillness: a blue-black carpet with its nap ruffled the wrong way to show the pink and pale gold beneath. Sometimes I walked over rough ground, and twice waded carefully through shallow streams with soft, hungry beds. But for the most of it I became my own running; and had I thought of anything at all, it might have been of another woman on another night path, and of what was behind her then. But running cannot think.
Running cannot think. It was plain chance that I recognized the sharp bend in the shoreline beyond which I had left Nyateneri. I stopped and waited for a few moments, letting myself return a little slowly to myself and listening for any least noise from that quarter-moon of stones and swordgrass. But I heard only the creaky piping of a long-legged skim stalking through the reeds. I shrugged my burdens silently to the ground, and I put my boots on and went forward.
No one was there. The late moon was rising, almost full, too full to hide from. I walked down to the water’s edge and squatted on my heels to read what I could. Most of the driftwood and all the heaps of dead-man’s-ringlets were gone—so Nyateneri had managed to build his mock-raft—and a few scrapes in the pebbly mud indicated that he must actually have launched it, though I saw no darkness of the right size or shape anywhere on the river. But the moonlight did show me two men’s jumbled footprints, one set booted, Nyateneri’s; the others those of a smaller man, barefoot. The prints skidded across each other, trampled and blurred each others’ outlines. I found no dried blood, no sure sign of a leg crippled or a body dragged. There was nothing to tell Lal the Great Tracker how it had been when Nyateneri turned in the twilight to meet the man coming out of the trees.
I stood up slowly, with no idea of where to turn myself—not even which way to look, let alone what to hope for, what to do next. The skim kept calling, and the moon grew smaller and colder as I watched, and so did I. My stomach hurt with my fear for Nyateneri; and then I grew furious at him for being someone I was frightened for, and for having the bloody nerve to be lost and dead in the night. It did not once occur to me to be angry with his killer until the little river wind shifted and I smelled him.
The two men in the bathhouse had smelled only of sudden death, which wipes out the natural odor instantly and forever. This was a nearly familiar smell, too sharp to be sweet, but not at all acrid; not the scent of a wild hunter, but of wild weather coming. My sword was already clear, though I did not remember having drawn it. I never do. I said, “I see you. I see you there.”
The chuckle just behind me was pleasant kin to the smelclass="underline" warm, sleepy lightning, stirring in its nest. “Do you so?” I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don’t understand. Never mind.
He was small, like the other two, smaller than I—a long-faced, crook-necked, thin-built man in loose dark clothing, strolling toward me out of a particular clump of reeds where there had been no one when I scanned it a minute before. I stepped backward, with the sword steady on his heart. “Stand, ” I said. “Stand. I don’t want to kill you yet. Stand.”
He kept walking, more slowly now. In the last of the twilight his eyes were so pale as to be almost white, and the teeth in his long wry mouth were the color of the river where it broke over a hidden snag. His hair was very short, hardly more than a shadow on his skull. Holding up his empty hands, he said pleasantly, “Well, of course you don’t want to kill me, Lal-after-dark. You don’t even want to be under the same moon with me.”
Rosseth had told me that the men Nyateneri fought had questioned him in strange voices, both having a cold, questioning lift to every phrase. This one spoke with the flat accent of this mountain country, touched only slightly by the sideways glide of the south—more than a bit like Nyateneri’s voice, in fact. He said now, “For myself, I’ve no quarrel at all with you. My work is completed. Let me pass.”
My stomach stopped hurting, strangely or not, and both fear and anger went from me. I answered him, “Not until you say what you have done with my companion, and likely not then. Stand.”
He smiled. I backed and backed again, making certain that I stayed on open ground and requesting of gods whose names I had nearly forgotten that I not stumble. He walked patiently after me, barely beyond the sword’s point, thin hands swinging loose at the ends of his thin arms. “He’s dead as dinner,” he said, “and well you know it. Unless you suppose that he fled me one more time, and what indeed would I be doing here in that case? Down sword, colleague, and let me by.”