Eodan bent his knee and backed out, as though he were leaving on some royal errand. And would the Powers it were so, he thought dully, knowing a wound took hours to feel pain.
He heard Flavius say, in a voice that quivered: “Great King, will you also let this guest depart?”
As if from immensely far away, the voice of Mithradates came: “There is a destiny here. I would stand in its way if I dared ― but I am only a man, even I…. Tomorrow at dawn, when we march north, you may quit the camp.” An animal scream: “Now leave my eyes! All of you! Every man in here, leave the King to himself!”
They streamed out, almost running, terror written beneath the bright helmets; for the king sat at a heathen god’s feet and wept.
Eodan saw Flavius stalk toward his own tent. They exchanged no words. He went to his place, clapped for a groom and donned his Persian war-garb. A saddled gray stallion was led forth. Eodan sprang upon it and trotted quickly from camp.
He would follow the highway south, hoping for a sign.
An hour afterward, when the Pontine army was only smoke on a gray horizon, he saw the dust cloud behind. It neared, until he could see the black horse that raised it, and finally he heard the drumbeat of its hoofs ― and Tjorr’s red beard flaunted itself in the wind.
“Whoof!” said the Alan, pulling up alongside him. “You might have waited.”
Eodan cried aloud, “It was not needful. You should have stayed where your luck was.”
“No ― now, what luck would come to a man that forsook his oaths?” said Tjorr. “I was weary of Pontus anyhow. Now we will surely drink of my Don again.”
XIX
“Since gossip brought you the tale so swiftly,” Eodan said, “you must also have heard the Romans will be after us at dawn tomorrow. They have money, and the Gauls here favor them; they’ll hire guides, dogs and a string of remounts.”
“I have hunted and been hunted on plains before now,” replied Tjorr. “A flock of sheep to confuse the scent, a trackless as soon as we leave this road ― Oh, we can race them all the way to Parthia with good hope of winning.”
“But that is what we may not do, and why you had best return before the King learns of your absence. I left only on Phryne’s account. I shall have to find her before undertaking such a trip, and it may consume all the time between me and the pursuit.”
Tjorr cocked an eye at him knowingly. Eodan felt his wind-beaten face grow hot. He said angrily, “She is my oath-sister. Did she think I would forget what that means?”
“Da,” nodded the Alan, “or she would have given herself to Mithradates with no fuss.” He squinted down the rutted dirt road, which wound among boulders and sere grass until it lost itself in stormy black clouds. “Now our task is to trail her, and she would have made herself hard to trail. We can only follow this, I think, till we come on someone who’s seen a boyish-looking horse archer go by… for thus I take it she equipped herself.”
“So my groom told me, and he was too frightened to make up a lie. Come, then!”
They jingled through unspeaking hours.
At day’s end they passed a goatherd in a stinking wool tunic and knitted Phrygian cap. He gave them a sullen look and mumbled his own language, which they did not understand, through greasy whiskers. Eodan felt grimness. Bad enough to be entering wilds where few if any could speak with him; but this was also a land where the half-Persian warriors had made themselves hated. He thought, as darkly and coldly as the whistling twilight, that Flavius might well overhaul him tomorrow before he had any word of Phryne. He might be wholly doomed; the gods feared proud men.
Well, if such was his destiny, he would give no god the pleasure of seeing him writhe under it.
“Ho-ah!” cried Tjorr.
Eodan looked up from his thoughts. The Alan pointed westward, where a single dirty-red streak beneath steel and smoke colors marked sunset. “A horse out there,” he said. Eodan spied the beast; it was trotting wearily north over the plain.
Horror stood up in him and screamed. He clamped back an answer of his own, struck spurs into his mount and left the highway. The wind snapped his cloak and tried to pull him from his seat. Once his horse stumbled on a rock, unseen in the gloom, but he kept the saddle, swaying lightly to help the animal muscles that flowed between his knees. And so he drew up to the other horse.
It was a chestnut gelding with silvered harness; a light ax was sheathed at the saddlebow ― thus did the riders of Pontus equip themselves. The beast shivered in the heartless wind; its tail streamed, but the mane was sweat-plastered to a sunken neck. Worn out, it groped a way back toward the king.
Eodan felt as if the heart had been cut from him, leaving only a hollowness that bled. “Hers,” he said.
“None else,” said Tjorr. “A lone alien, with arms and armor worth ten years of a shepherd’s work … a sling … and the steed bolted―” He looked down upon his useless hands. “I am sorry, my sister.”
Eodan let her horse go. He began to follow the way it had come, as nearly as he could judge. He would not leave Phryne’s bones to whiten on this plain. Surely the gods cared for her, if not for him. They would lead him to her and grant him the time to make a pyre and a cairn and to howl over her.
Dusk thickened. After some part of an hour, he heard a furtive scuttering in the grass. He rode after it, and a naked man squeaked forlornly and dodged from him. It was a Phrygian, wholly bare; he had not even a staff, but he clutched something to his breast as he ran. Eodan drew rein and watched him go.
“What happened to him?” asked Tjorr, clasping his hammer; for this was an uncanny thing to meet on a treeless autumnal plain at nightfall.
“I do not know,” said Eodan. “Robbers ― the same who killed Phryne? ― or some trolldom, perhaps, for we are in no good country. We cannot speak with that man, so best we leave him alone to his weird.”
They trotted on. But it grew too dark to see, and Eodan would not risk passing by his oath-sister. In the morning the kites would show him from afar where she lay. Then the Romans would come, and he would stand by her grave and fight till they slew him.
“I would like a fire,” said Tjorr. He fumbled in the murk, caring for his horse. “The night-gangers would stay away.”
“They will anyhow,” Eodan told him. “It is not fated that we should be devoured by witch-beasts.”
Tjorr said, with awe heavy in his tones: “I will believe that. You are something more than a man tonight.”
“I am a man with a goal,” said Eodan. “Nothing else.”
“That is enough,” said Tjorr. “It is more than I could bear to be. I dare not touch you before dawn.”
Eodan rolled himself into the saddle blanket, put his head on his wadded cloak and lay in cold, streaming darkness. The earth felt sick, yearning for rain, and the rain was withheld. He wondered if some of the lightning Tjorr called on had indeed been locked up in the hammer. When they died tomorrow, the rain might come; or perhaps, thought Eodan, the first snow, for he is the rain but I am the winter.
I am the wind.
He lay listening to himself blow across the earth, in darkness, in darkness, with the unrestful slain Cimbri rushing through the sky behind him. He searched all these evil plains for Phryne; the whole night became his search for Phryne’s ghost. There were many skulls strewn in the long dead grasses, for this land was very old. But none of them was hers, and none of them could tell him anything of her; they only gave him back his own empty whistling. He searched further, up over the Caucasus glaciers and then down to a sea that roared under his lash, until finally he came riding past a bloody-breasted hound, through sounding caves to the gates of hell; hoofs rang hollow as he circled hell, calling Phryne’s name, but there was no answer. Though he shook his spear beneath black walls, no one stirred, no one spoke, even the echoes died. So he knew that hell was dead, it had long ago been deserted; and he rode back to the upper world feeling loneliness horrible within him. And centuries had passed while he was gone. It was spring again. He rode by the grave mound of a warrior named Eodan, which stood out on the edge of the world where the wind was forever blowing; and on the sheltered side he saw a little coltsfoot bloom, the first flower of spring.