Not knowing exactly who it was that needed to believe.
She'd asked him to come and he'd said nothing. Asked again into the silence. But she knew he had not seen himself in that future and so he already knew he would not come and there was little more to it for a man who remembered what he had yet to do.
Halfway up she could really start to see the light. Early morning in the city. The shadows moving in that light. People walking down the dirt road to the stores, a wagon going to the market. Men and women calling out. The city waking up, but not yet fully awake. The sun on the horizon in a bold orange as it rose.
She climbed for that light. Every step closer, every handhold. Slipping a second time and feeling it in her stomach and holding on to press herself against the stone. Breathing very hard. In a moment the feeling passed and she placed her hand carefully and surely and moved up the wall. Alive again and unwilling to look below.
And then she was at the bars. They were so far away and then came up all at once and she wrapped her fingers around those which were left, the three in the center torn away, and she held to them and felt more secure than at any time during the ascent. The metal solid and firm in the stone. She pulled her face close and leaned forward to that gap and could not tell if she would fit or not and looked out.
The alley cast in shadow. Empty and desolate now the road. She looked long down to her left and a man was walking around the far corner with something in his arms. The other way was nothing at all, the road running along below the wall, curving away and disappearing. She looked at it and could hear nothing and looked back down finally at the old man below her. He just stood in silence and did not pull his eyes from her. She steeled herself and looked back to check the empty road again and then began to pull herself through the bars.
She thought that someone would come and no one did. The bars tight on both sides of her. Once for a moment she was stuck in that metal claw and then she thought of her husband below and pushed and then she was free. Lying in the dirt of the road and gasping and the sweat running down the back of her neck and it felt like nothing else. Looking down the road and seeing no walls. The chains still hanging from her wrists shortened and shattered.
And then all at once she was terrified. For this freedom she'd dreamed of she now held and at any moment someone would call out and it would fall apart around her and be swept away. Precious and fragile and maybe more precious for that fragility. She looked back at the hole between the bars and thought about what he had said and then turned and ran in that rising sun, her bare feet in the swirling dust, running as the morning light washed out the shadow of the wall.
Chapter Fourteen
The boy woke the next morning and seemed himself and they packed what little they had on the horses and Juoth rode out first into the road with that road falling away below him into the sweeping plains and he trotted his horse sideways and stood it in the road and looked down on that world as it stretched. Brack still pulling the boy up behind him and looking at the dead girl lashed and rolled in her blanket on the other horse. Hauling his mount about by the reins and glancing once more at the camp where they'd left only ash and the grease from the rabbit dried in that ash and the dust from the road rising about them in the early morning sun as the horses pranced.
He rode up to where Juoth waited and looked ahead. It was a long fall through timber and rock and open grass into a valley deep below. The range ran out to both sides of them and a point pushing forward to the west where he could see the thick cedar forest rising up the slope and giving way in that valley to grass alone. He thought he saw a long way down a stone bridge over a gorge but there the trees were thick. Rising on the far side the last hill and much shorter and just glimpsed beyond it—a view they would lose as they rode down—the open and yawning yellow plains.
Above the sky nearly white as if all color had bled from it. An empty firmament without bird or cloud or dragon. He could see Juoth looking with his hand on the bow and as always he knew the dragon's heart and where it would be and so he only looked as he must and knew instantly that the emptiness confirmed that knowledge which he already had. It would not kill them here and yet death clung all about them and he could feel it in his clothes and hair and skin.
The dead girl lashed to the horse.
They rode down in that rising dust and the day began to warm as they went and it was as always farther in life than it had appeared. The slope not heavy but endless and the horses trotting and soon breathing hard and the sun coming up above the range to the right and baking the world. He had not worn his furs again and was glad for it and he began to sweat all the same and the boy also.
They passed halfway down the remains of a mill. This abandoned for many years. A ramshackle house with the roof fallen in and a long storage barn now little more than posts and trusses standing and in the water the old wheel still turning in the current of a small stream. Pieces of the wheel missing and it no longer driving anything but turning all the same. Spinning in revolutions without end. How long it had done so or how many revolutions it had made Brack knew not and thought that no man could know and there was something in that.
He had never seen it in another time but he could imagine what it had been. Everything along this forgotten road now abandoned where once men and horses and cattle and wagons had moved. Women and children also and calling out to one another in the warm sun. Sheep perhaps being driven, carts full of goods. This road the heartblood of some world and seeming to all who used it as if it had always existed and always would and now the lie put to that for few men knew its path and fewer used it.
That life not depleted, but elsewhere. Somewhere other roads with the sounds and life this had once borne. Those too to be abandoned and forgotten in their own time. As others had before and would after.
But here the dragon had never been and Brack saw Juoth looking at him and he did not return it for he knew the other man was no fool and knew he was not hunting but just riding.
They came at noon to the Fall of Revian. A towering stone cliff rising up before them, the rock running up in straight lines to a crest covered to the very edge of the cliff in moss and cedars. The moss running down the face of the rock. The river above entirely lost in the trees but the waterfall pouring out like the rock itself was broken and this river a living thing born from it. Cascading down in showering white and falling over the break in the stone where the road tunneled through. That stone endlessly drenched and dark and the foothills very green where the land moved away from the wall and they rode on through on the stone roadbed and the horses shying at first and then going through the spray. The air full of color and light in the mist, the sound everywhere and filling the world entire for that passage.
Coming out the far side through the gap in the rock with the fall thundering behind them they found a small pool and the ground flattened out around them and they could see little beyond this clearing for the trees. The road picking its way forward ahead of them as the river curved around. Somewhere the bridge and gorge and then the shorter rise of that last hill. Lost now and only the rise visible slightly before them and the jagged mountains at their back. How the descent moved them into this other world.
He pulled the horse up at the edge of the pool and the boy dismounted and he followed and then he led the horse over to the water and put the reins down to let him drink. Juoth doing the same and looking about at these thin trees with their paper bark and the empty sky.