Three Hainish Novels Read online

“If my Lord Mogien finds me he’ll kill me. It is his right.”

  By the Angyar code, this was true; and if anyone would keep the code, it was Mogien.

  “If you find a new master, the old one may not touch you: is that not true, Yahan?”

  The boy nodded. “But a rebellious man finds no new master.”

  “That depends. Pledge your service to me, and I’ll answer for you to Mogien—if we find him. I don’t know what words you use.”

  “We say”—Yahan spoke very low—“to my Lord I give the hours of my life and the use of my death.”

  “I accept them. And with them my own life which you gave back to me.”

  The little river ran noisily from the ridge above them, and the sky darkened solemnly. In late dusk Rocannon slipped off his impermasuit and, stretching out in the stream, let the cold water running all along his body wash away sweat and weariness and fear and the memory of the fire licking at his eyes. Off, the suit was a handful of transparent stuff and semivisible, hairthin tubes and wires and a couple of translucent cubes the size of a fingernail. Yahan watched him with an uncomfortable look as he put the suit on again (since he had no clothes, and Yahan had been forced to trade his Angyar clothing for a couple of dirty herilo fleeces). “Lord Olhor,” he said at last, “it was…was it that skin that kept the fire from burning you? Or the…the jewel?”

  The necklace was hidden now in Yahan’s own amulet-bag, around Rocannon’s neck. Rocannon answered gently, “The skin. No spells. It’s a very strong kind of armor.”

  “And the white staff?”

  He looked down at the driftwood stick, one end of it heavily charred; Yahan had picked it up from the grass of the sea-cliff, last night, just as Zgama’s men had brought it along to the fort with him; they had seemed determined he should keep it. What was a wizard without his staff? “Well,” he said, “it’s a good walking-stick, if we’ve got to walk.” He stretched again, and for want of more supper before they slept, drank once more from the dark, cold, noisy stream.

  Late next morning when he woke, he was recovered, and ravenous. Yahan had gone off at dawn, to check his snares and because he was too cold to lie longer in their damp den. He returned with only a handful of herbs, and a piece of bad news. He had crossed over the forested ridge which they were on the seaward side of, and from its top had seen to the south another broad reach of the sea.

  “Did those misbegotten fish-eaters from Tolen leave us on an island?” he growled, his usual optimism subverted by cold, hunger, and doubt.

  Rocannon tried to recall the coastline on his drowned maps. A river running in from the west emptied on the north of a long tongue of land, itself part of a coastwise mountainchain running west to east; between that tongue and the mainland was a sound, long and wide enough to show up very clear on the maps and in his memory. A hundred, two hundred kilometers long? “How wide?” he asked Yahan, who answered glumly, “Very wide. I can’t swim, Lord.”

  “We can walk. This ridge joins the mainland, west of here. Mogien will be looking for us along that way, probably.” It was up to him to provide leadership—Yahan had certainly done more than his share—but his heart was low in him at the thought of that long detour through unknown and hostile country. Yahan had seen no one, but had crossed paths, and there must be men in these woods to make the game so scarce and shy.

  But for there to be any hope of Mogien’s finding them—if Mogien was alive, and free, and still had the windsteeds—they would have to work southward, and if possible out into open country. He would look for them going south, for that was all the goal of their journey. “Let’s go,” Rocannon said, and they went.

  A little after midday they looked down from the ridge across a broad inlet running east and west as far as eye could see, lead-gray under a low sky. Nothing of the southern shore could be made out but a line of low, dark, dim hills. The wind that blew up the sound was bitter cold at their backs as they worked down to the shore and started westward along it. Yahan looked up at the clouds, hunched his head down between his shoulders and said mournfully, “It’s going to snow.”

  And presently the snow began, a wet windblown snow of spring, vanishing on the wet ground as quickly as on the dark water of the sound. Rocannon’s suit kept the cold from him, but strain and hunger made him very weary; Yahan was also weary, and very cold. They slogged along, for there was nothing else to do. They forded a creek, plugged up the bank through coarse grass and blowing snow, and at the top came face to face with a man.

  “Houf!” he said staring in surprise and then in wonder. For what he saw was two men walking in a snowstorm, one blue-lipped and shivering in ragged furs, the other one stark naked. “Ha, houf!” he said again. He was a tall, bony, bowed, bearded man with a wild look in his dark eyes. “Ha you, there!” he said in the Olgyior speech, “you’ll freeze to death!”

  “We had to swim—our boat sank,” Yahan improvised promptly. “Have you a house with a fire in it, hunter of pelliunur?”

  “You were crossing the sound from the south?”

  The man looked troubled, and Yahan replied with a vague gesture, “We’re from the east—we came to buy pelliun-furs, but all our tradegoods went down in the water.”

  “Hanh, hanh,” the wild man went, still troubled, but a genial streak in him seemed to win out over his fears. “Come on; I have fire and food,” he said, and turning, he jigged off into the thin, gusting snow. Following, they came soon to his hut perched on a slope between the forested ridge and the sound. Inside and out it was like any winter hut of the midmen of the forests and hills of Angien, and Yahan squatted down before the fire with a sigh of frank relief, as if at home. That reassured their host better than any ingenious explanations. “Build up the fire, lad,” he said, and he gave Rocannon a homespun cloak to wrap himself in.

  Throwing off his own cloak, he set a clay bowl of stew in the ashes to warm, and hunkered down companionably with them, rolling his eyes at one and then the other. “Always snows this time of year, and it’ll snow harder soon. Plenty of room for you; there’s three of us winter here. The others will be in tonight or tomorrow or soon enough; they’ll be staying out this snowfall up on the ridge where they were hunting. Pelliun hunters we are, as you saw by my whistles, eh lad?” He touched the set of heavy wooden panpipes dangling at his belt, and grinned. He had a wild, fierce, foolish look to him, but his hospitality was tangible. He gave them their fill of meat stew, and when the evening darkened, told them to get their rest. Rocannon lost no time. He rolled himself up in the stinking furs of the bed-niche, and slept like a baby.

  In the morning snow still fell, and the ground now was white and featureless. Their host’s companions had not come back. “They’ll have spent the night over across the Spine, in Timash village. They’ll come along when it clears.”

  “The Spine—that’s the arm of the sea there?”

  “No, that’s the sound—no villages across it! The Spine’s the ridge, the hills up above us here. Where do you come from, anyhow? You talk like us here, mostly, but your uncle don’t.”

  Yahan glanced apologetically at Rocannon, who had been asleep while acquiring a nephew. “Oh—he’s from the Backlands; they talk differently. We call that water the sound, too. I wish I knew a fellow with a boat to bring us across it.”

  “You want to go south?”

  “Well, now that all our goods are gone, we’re nothing here but beggars. We’d better try to get home.”

  “There’s a boat down on the shore, a ways from here. We’ll see about that when the weather clears. I’ll tell you, lad, when you talk so cool about going south my blood gets cold. There’s no man dwelling between the sound and the great mountains, that ever I heard of, unless it’s the Ones not talked of. And that’s all old stories, and who’s to say if there’s any mountains even? I’ve been over on the other side of the sound—there’s not many men can tell you that. Been there myself, hunting, in the hills. There’s plenty of pelliunur there, near the water. But no villa
ges. No men. None. And I wouldn’t stay the night.”

  “We’ll just follow the southern shore eastward,” Yahan said indifferently, but with a perplexed look; his inventions were forced into further complexity with every question.

  But his instinct to lie had been correct—“At least you didn’t sail from the north!” their host, Piai, rambled on, sharpening his long, leaf-bladed knife on a whetstone as he talked. “No men at all across the sound, and across the sea only mangy fellows that serve as slaves to the Yellowheads. Don’t your people know about them? In the north country over the sea there’s a race of men with yellow heads. It’s true. They say that they live in houses high as trees, and carry silver swords, and ride between the wings of windsteeds! I’ll believe that when I see it. Windsteed fur brings a good price over on the coast, but the beasts are dangerous to hunt, let alone taming one and riding it. You can’t believe all people tell in tales. I make a good enough living out of pelliun furs. I can bring the beasts from a day’s flight around. Listen!” He put his panpipes to his hairy lips and blew, very faintly at first, a half-heard, halting plaint that swelled and changed, throbbing and breaking between notes, rising into an almost-melody that was a wild beast’s cry. The chill went up Rocannon’s back; he had heard that tune in the forests of Hallan. Yahan, who had been trained as a huntsman, grinned with excitement and cried out as if on the hunt and sighting the quarry, “Sing! sing! she rises there!” He and Piai spent the rest of the afternoon swapping hunting-stories, while outside the snow still fell, windless now and steady.

  The next day dawned clear. As on a morning of coldyear, the sun’s ruddy-white brilliance was blinding on the snow-whitened hills. Before midday Piai’s two companions arrived with a few of the downy gray pelliun-furs. Black-browed, strapping men like all those southern Olgyior, they seemed still wilder than Piai, wary as animals of the strangers, avoiding them, glancing at them only sideways.

  “They call my people slaves,” Yahan said to Rocannon when the others were outside the hut for a minute. “But I’d rather be a man serving men than a beast hunting beasts, like these.” Rocannon raised his hand, and Yahan was silent as one of the Southerners came in, glancing sidelong at them, unspeaking.

  “Let’s go,” Rocannon muttered in the Olgyior tongue, which he had mastered a little more of these last two days. He wished they had not waited till Piai’s companions had come, and Yahan also was uneasy. He spoke to Piai, who had just come in:

  “We’ll be going now—this fair weather should hold till we get around the inlet. If you hadn’t sheltered us we’d never have lived through these two nights of cold. And I never would have heard the pelliun-song so played. May all your hunting be fortunate!”

  But Piai stood still and said nothing. Finally he hawked, spat on the fire, rolled his eyes, and growled, “Around the inlet? Didn’t you want to cross by boat? There’s a boat. It’s mine. Anyhow, I can use it. We’ll take you over the water.”

  “Six days walking that’ll save you,” the shorter newcomer, Karmik, put in.

  “It’ll save you six days walking,” Piai repeated. “We’ll take you across in the boat. We can go now.”

  “All right,” Yahan replied after glancing at Rocannon; there was nothing they could do.

  “Then let’s go,” Piai grunted, and so abruptly, with no offer of provision for the way, they left the hut, Piai in the lead and his friends bringing up the rear. The wind was keen, the sun bright; though snow remained in sheltered places, the rest of the ground ran and squelched and glittered with the thaw. They followed the shore westward for a long way, and the sun was set when they reached a little cove where a rowboat lay among rocks and reeds out on the water. Red of sunset flushed the water and the western sky; above the red glow the little moon Heliki gleamed waxing, and in the darkening east the Greatstar, Fomalhaut’s distant companion, shone like an opal. Under the brilliant sky, over the brilliant water, the long hilly shores ran featureless and dark.

  “There’s the boat,” said Piai, stopping and facing them, his face red with the western light. The other two came and stood in silence beside Rocannon and Yahan.

  “You’ll be rowing back in darkness,” Yahan said.

  “Greatstar shines; it’ll be a light night. Now, lad, there’s the matter of paying us for our rowing you.”

  “Ah,” said Yahan.

  “Piai knows—we have nothing. This cloak is his gift,” said Rocannon, who, seeing how the wind blew, did not care if his accent gave them away.

  “We are poor hunters. We can’t give gifts,” said Karmik, who had a softer voice and a saner, meaner look than Piai and the other one.

  “We have nothing,” Rocannon repeated. “Nothing to pay for the rowing. Leave us here.”

  Yahan joined in, saying the same thing more fluently, but Karmik interrupted: “You’re wearing a bag around your neck, stranger. What’s in it?”

  “My soul,” said Rocannon promptly.

  They all stared at him, even Yahan. But he was in a poor position to bluff, and the pause did not last. Karmik put his hand on his leaf-bladed hunting knife, and moved closer; Piai and the other imitated him. “You were in Zgama’s fort,” he said. “They told a long tale about it in Timash village. How a naked man stood in a burning fire, and burned Zgama with a white stick, and walked out of the fort wearing a great jewel on a gold chain around his neck. They said it was magic and spells. I think they are all fools. Maybe you can’t be hurt. But this one—” He grabbed Yahan lightning-quick by his long hair, twisted his head back and sideways, and brought the knife up against his throat. “Boy, you tell this stranger you travel with to pay for your lodging—eh?”

  They all stood still. The red dimmed on the water, the Greatstar brightened in the east, the cold wind blew past them down the shore.

  “We won’t hurt the lad,” Piai growled, his fierce face twisted and frowning. “We’ll do what I said, we’ll row you over the sound—only pay us. You didn’t say you had gold to pay with. You said you’d lost all your gold. You slept under my roof. Give us the thing and we’ll row you across.”

  “I will give it—over there,” Rocannon said, pointing across the sound.

  “No,” Karmik said.

  Yahan, helpless in his hands, had not moved a muscle; Rocannon could see the beating of the artery in his throat, against which the knife-blade lay.

  “Over there,” he repeated grimly, and tilted his driftwood walking stick forward a little in case the sight of it might impress them. “Row us across; I give you the thing. This I tell you. But hurt him and you die here, now. This I tell you!”

  “Karmik, he’s a pedan,” Piai muttered. “Do what he says. They were under the roof with me, two nights. Let the boy go. He promises the thing you want.”

  Karmik looked scowling from him to Rocannon and said at last, “Throw that white stick away. Then we’ll take you across.”

  “First let the boy go,” said Rocannon, and when Karmik released Yahan, he laughed in his face and tossed the stick high, end over end, out into the water.

  Knives drawn, the three huntsmen herded him and Yahan to the boat; they had to wade out and climb in her from the slippery rocks on which dull-red ripples broke. Piai and the third man rowed, Karmik sat knife in hand behind the passengers.

  “Will you give him the jewel?” Yahan whispered in the Common Tongue, which these Olgyior of the peninsula did not use.

  Rocannon nodded.

  Yahan’s whisper was very hoarse and shaky. “You jump and swim with it, Lord. Near the south shore. They’ll let me go, when it’s gone—”

  “They’d slit your throat. Shh.”

  “They’re casting spells, Karmik,” the third man was saying. “They’re going to sink the boat—”

  “Row, you rotten fish-spawn. You, be still, or I’ll cut the boy’s neck.”

  Rocannon sat patiently on the thwart, watching the water turn misty gray as the shores behind and before them receded into night. Their knives could not hurt him,
but they could kill Yahan before he could do much to them. He could have swum for it easy enough, but Yahan could not swim. There was no choice. At least they were getting the ride they were paying for.

  Slowly the dim hills of the southern shore rose and took on substance. Faint gray shadows dropped westward and few stars came out in the gray sky; the remote solar brilliance of the Greatstar dominated even the moon Heliki, now in its waning cycle. They could hear the sough of waves against the shore. “Quit rowing,” Karmik ordered, and to Rocannon: “Give me the thing now.”

  “Closer to shore,” Rocannon said impassively.

  “I can make it from here, Lord,” Yahan muttered shakily. “There are reeds sticking up ahead there—”

  The boat moved a few oarstrokes ahead and halted again.

  “Jump when I do,” Rocannon said to Yahan, and then slowly rose and stood up on the thwart. He unsealed the neck of the suit he had worn so long now, broke the leather cord around his neck with a jerk, tossed the bag that held the sapphire and its chain into the bottom of the boat, resealed the suit and in the same instant dived.

  He stood with Yahan a couple of minutes later among the rocks of the shore, watching the boat, a blackish blur in the gray quarter-light on the water, shrinking.

  “Oh may they rot, may they have worms in their bowels and their bones turn to slime,” Yahan said, and began to cry. He had been badly scared, but more than the reaction from fear broke down his self-control. To see a “lord” toss away a jewel worth a kingdom’s ransom to save a midman’s life, his life, was to see all order subverted, admitting unbearable responsibility. “It was wrong, Lord!” he cried out. “It was wrong!”

  “To buy your life with a rock? Come on, Yahan, get a hold of yourself. You’ll freeze if we don’t get a fire going. Have you got your drill? There’s a lot of brushwood up this way. Get a move on!”

  They managed to get a fire going there on the shore, and built it up till it drove back the night and the still, keen cold. Rocannon had given Yahan the huntsman’s fur cape, and huddling in it the young man finally went to sleep. Rocannon sat keeping the fire burning, uneasy and with no wish to sleep. His own heart was heavy that he had had to throw away the necklace, not because it was valuable, but because once he had given it to Semley, whose remembered beauty had brought him, over all the years, to this world; because Haldre had given it to him, hoping, he knew, thus to buy off the shadow, the early death she feared for her son. Maybe it was as well the thing was gone, the weight, the danger of its beauty. And maybe, if worst came to worst, Mogien would never know that it was gone; because Mogien would not find him, or was already dead…He put that thought aside. Mogien was looking for him and Yahan—that must be his assumption. He would look for them going south. For what plan had they ever had, except to go south—there to find the enemy, or, if all his guesses had been wrong, not to find the enemy? But with or without Mogien, he would go south.