Three Hainish Novels Page 9

  They set out at dawn, climbing the shoreline hills in the twilight, reaching the top of them as the rising sun revealed a high, empty plain running sheer to the horizon, streaked with the long shadows of bushes. Piai had been right, apparently, when he said nobody lived south of the sound. At least Mogien would be able to see them from miles off. They started south.

  It was cold, but mostly clear. Yahan wore what clothes they had, Rocannon his suit. They crossed creeks angling down toward the sound now and then, often enough to keep them from thirst. That day and next day they went on, living on the roots of a plant called peya and on a couple of stump-winged, hop-flying, coney-like creatures that Yahan knocked out of the air with a stick and cooked on a fire of twigs lit with his firedrill. They saw no other living thing. Clear to the sky the high grasslands stretched, level, treeless, roadless, silent.

  Oppressed by immensity, the two men sat by their tiny fire in the vast dusk, saying nothing. Overhead at long intervals, like the beat of a pulse in the night, came a soft cry very high in the air. They were barilor, wild cousins of the tamed herilor, making their northward spring migration. The stars for a hand’s breadth would be blotted out by the great flocks, but never more than a single voice called, brief, a pulse on the wind.

  “Which of the stars do you come from, Olhor?” Yahan asked softly, gazing up.

  “I was born on a world called Hain by my mother’s people, and Davenant by my father’s. You call its sun the Winter Crown. But I left it long ago…”

  “You’re not all one people, then, the Starfolk?”

  “Many hundred peoples. By blood I’m entirely of my mother’s race; my father, who was a Terran, adopted me. This is the custom when people of different species, who cannot conceive children, marry. As if one of your kin should marry a Fian woman.”

  “This does not happen,” Yahan said stiffly.

  “I know. But Terran and Davenanter are as alike as you and I. Few worlds have so many different races as this one. Most often there is one, much like us, and the rest are beasts without speech.”

  “You’ve seen many worlds,” the young man said dreamily, trying to conceive of it.

  “Too many,” said the older man. “I’m forty, by your years; but I was born a hundred and forty years ago. A hundred years I’ve lost without living them, between the worlds. If I went back to Davenant or Earth, the men and women I knew would be a hundred years dead. I can only go on; or stop, somewhere—What’s that?” The sense of some presence seemed to silence even the hissing of wind through grass. Something moved at the edge of the firelight—a great shadow, a darkness. Rocannon knelt tensely; Yahan sprang away from the fire.

  Nothing moved. Wind hissed in the grass in the gray starlight. Clear around the horizon the stars shone, unbroken by any shadow.

  The two rejoined at the fire. “What was it?” Rocannon asked.

  Yahan shook his head. “Piai talked of…something…”

  They slept patchily, trying to spell each other keeping watch. When the slow dawn came they were very tired. They sought tracks or marks where the shadow had seemed to stand, but the young grass showed nothing. They stamped out their fire and went on, heading southward by the sun.

  They had thought to cross a stream soon, but they did not. Either the stream-courses now were running north-south, or there simply were no more. The plain or pampas that seemed never to change as they walked had been becoming always a little dryer, a little grayer. This morning they saw none of the peya bushes, only the coarse gray-green grass going on and on.

  At noon Rocannon stopped.

  “It’s no good, Yahan,” he said.

  Yahan rubbed his neck, looking around, then turned his gaunt, tired young face to Rocannon. “If you want to go on, Lord, I will.”

  “We can’t make it without water or food. We’ll steal a boat on the coast and go back to Hallan. This is no good. Come on.”

  Rocannon turned and walked northward. Yahan came along beside him. The high spring sky burned blue, the wind hissed endlessly in the endless grass. Rocannon went along steadily, his shoulders a little bent, going step by step into permanent exile and defeat. He did not turn when Yahan stopped.

  “Windsteeds!”

  Then he looked up and saw them, three great gryphoncats circling down upon them, claws outstretched, wings black against the hot blue sky.

  PART TWO: The Wanderer

  VI

  MOGIEN LEAPED OFF his steed before it had its feet on the ground, ran to Rocannon and hugged him like a brother. His voice rang with delight and relief. “By Hendin’s lance, Starlord! why are you marching stark naked across this desert? How did you get so far south by walking north? Are you—” Mogien met Yahan’s gaze, and stopped short.

  Rocannon said, “Yahan is my bondsman.”

  Mogien said nothing. After a certain struggle with himself he began to grin, then he laughed out loud. “Did you learn our customs in order to steal my servants, Rokanan? But who stole your clothes?”

  “Olhor wears more skins than one,” said Kyo, coming with his light step over the grass. “Hail, Firelord! Last night I heard you in my mind.”

  “Kyo led us to you,” Mogien confirmed. “Since we set foot on Fiern’s shore ten days ago he never spoke a word, but last night, on the bank of the sound, when Lioka rose, he listened to the moonlight and said, ‘There!’ Come daylight we flew where he had pointed, and so found you.”

  “Where is Iot?” Rocannon asked, seeing only Raho stand holding the windsteeds’ reins. Mogien with unchanging face replied, “Dead. The Olgyior came on us in the fog on the beach. They had only stones for weapons, but they were many. Iot was killed, and you were lost. We hid in a cave in the seacliffs till the steeds would fly again. Raho went forth and heard tales of a stranger who stood in a burning fire unburnt, and wore a blue jewel. So when the steeds would fly we went to Zgama’s fort, and not finding you we dropped fire on his wretched roofs and drove his herds into the forests, and then began to look for you along the banks of the sound.”

  “The jewel, Mogien,” Rocannon interrupted; “the Eye of Sea—I had to buy our lives with it. I gave it away.”

  “The jewel?” said Mogien, staring. “Semley’s jewel—you gave it away? Not to buy your life—who can harm you? To buy that worthless life, that disobedient halfman? You hold my heritage cheap! Here, take the thing; it’s not so easily lost!” He spun something up in the air with a laugh, caught it, and tossed it glittering to Rocannon, who stood and gaped at it, the blue stone burning in his hand, the golden chain.

  “Yesterday we met two Olgyior, and one dead one, on the other shore of the sound, and we stopped to ask about a naked traveler they might have seen going by with his worthless servant. One of them groveled on his face and told us the story, and so I took the jewel from the other one. And his life along with it, because he fought. Then we knew you had crossed the sound; and Kyo brought us straight to you. But why were you going northward, Rokanan?”

  “To—to find water.”

  “There’s a stream to the west,” Raho put in. “I saw it just before we saw you.”

  “Let’s go to it. Yahan and I haven’t drunk since last night.”

  They mounted the windsteeds, Yahan with Raho, Kyo in his old place behind Rocannon. The wind-bowed grass dropped away beneath them, and they skimmed southwestward between the vast plain and the sun.

  They camped by the stream that wound clear and slow among flowerless grasses. Rocannon could at last take off the impermasuit, and dressed in Mogien’s spare shirt and cloak. They ate hardbread brought from Tolen, peya roots, and four of the stump-winged coneys shot by Raho and by Yahan, who was full of joy when he got his hands on a bow again. The creatures out here on the plain almost flew upon the arrows, and let the windsteeds snap them up in flight, having no fear. Even the tiny green and violet and yellow creatures called kilar, insect-like with transparent buzzing wings, though they were actually tiny marsupials, here were fearless and curious, hovering about
one’s head, peering with round gold eyes, lighting on one’s hand or knee a moment and skimming distractingly off again. It looked as if all this immense grassland were void of intelligent life. Mogien said they had seen no sign of men or other beings as they had flown above the plain.

  “We thought we saw some creature last night, near the fire,” Rocannon said hesitantly, for what had they seen? Kyo looked around at him from the cooking-fire; Mogien, unbuckling his belt that held the double swords, said nothing.

  They broke camp at first light and all day rode the wind between plain and sun. Flying above the plain was as pleasant as walking across it had been hard. So passed the following day, and just before evening, as they looked out for one of the small streams that rarely broke the expanse of grass, Yahan turned in his saddle and called across the wind, “Olhor! See ahead!” Very far ahead, due south, a faint ruffling or crimping of gray broke the smooth horizon.

  “The mountains!” Rocannon said, and as he spoke he heard Kyo behind him draw breath sharply, as if in fear.

  During the next day’s flight the flat pampas gradually rose into low swells and rolls of land, vast waves on a quiet sea. High-piled clouds drifted northward above them now and then, and far ahead they could see the land tilting upward, growing dark and broken. By evening the mountains were clear; when the plain was dark the remote, tiny peaks in the south still shone bright gold for a long time. From those far peaks as they faded, the moon Lioka rose and sailed up like a great, hurrying, yellow star. Feni and Feli were already shining, moving in more stately fashion from east to west. Last of the four rose Heliki and pursued the others, brightening and dimming in a half-hour cycle, brightening and dimming. Rocannon lay on his back and watched, through the high black stems of grass, the slow and radiant complexity of the lunar dance.

  Next morning when he and Kyo went to mount the gray-striped windsteed Yahan cautioned him, standing at the beast’s head: “Ride him with care today, Olhor.” The windsteed agreed with a cough and a long snarl, echoed by Mogien’s gray.

  “What ails them?”

  “Hunger!” said Raho, reining in his white steed hard. “They got their fill of Zgama’s herilor, but since we started across this plain there’s been no big game, and these hop-flyers are only a mouthful to ’em. Belt in your cloak, Lord Olhor—if it blows within reach of your steed’s jaws you’ll be his dinner.” Raho, whose brown hair and skin testified to the attraction one of his grandmothers had exerted on some Angyar nobleman, was more brusque and mocking than most midmen. Mogien never rebuked him, and Raho’s harshness did not hide his passionate loyalty to his lord. A man near middle age, he plainly thought this journey a fool’s errand, and as plainly had never thought to do anything but go with his young lord into any peril.

  Yahan handed up the reins and dodged back from Rocannon’s steed, which leaped like a released spring into the air. All that day the three steeds flew wildly, tirelessly, toward the hunting-grounds they sensed or scented to the south, and a north wind hastened them on. Forested foothills rose always darker and clearer under the floating barrier of mountains. Now there were trees on the plain, clumps and groves like islands in the swelling sea of grass. The groves thickened into forests broken by green parkland. Before dusk they came down by a little sedgy lake among wooded hills. Working fast and gingerly, the two midmen stripped all packs and harness off the steeds, stood back and let them go. Up they shot, bellowing, wide wings beating, flew off in three different directions over the hills, and were gone.

  “They’ll come back when they’ve fed,” Yahan told Rocannon, “or when Lord Mogien blows his still whistle.”

  “Sometimes they bring mates back with them—wild ones,” Raho added, baiting the tenderfoot.

  Mogien and the midmen scattered, hunting hop-flyers or whatever else turned up; Rocannon pulled some fat peya-roots and put them to roast wrapped in their leaves in the ashes of the campfire. He was expert at making do with what any land offered, and enjoyed it; and these days of great flights between dusk and dusk, of constant barely-assuaged hunger, of sleep on the bare ground in the wind of spring, had left him very fine-drawn, tuned and open to every sensation and impression. Rising, he saw that Kyo had wandered down to the lake-edge and was standing there, a slight figure no taller than the reeds that grew far out into the water. He was looking up at the mountains that towered gray across the south, gathering around their high heads all the clouds and silence of the sky. Rocannon, coming up beside him, saw in his face a look both desolate and eager. He said without turning, in his light hesitant voice, “Olhor, you have again the jewel.”

  “I keep trying to give it away,” Rocannon said, grinning.

  “Up there,” the Fian said, “you must give more than gold and stones…What will you give, Olhor, there in the cold, in the high place, the gray place? From the fire to the cold…” Rocannon heard him, and watched him, yet did not see his lips move. A chill went through him and he closed his mind, retreating from the touch of a strange sense into his own humanity, his own identity. After a minute Kyo turned, calm and smiling as usual, and spoke in his usual voice. “There are Fiia beyond these foothills, beyond the forests, in green valleys. My people like the valleys, even here, the sunlight and the low places. We may find their villages in a few days’ flight.”

  This was good news to the others when Rocannon reported it. “I thought we were going to find no speaking beings here. A fine, rich land to be so empty,” Raho said.

  Watching a pair of the dragonfly-like kilar dancing like winged amethysts above the lake, Mogien said, “It was not always empty. My people crossed it long ago, in the years before the heroes, before Hallan was built or high Oynhall, before Hendin struck the great stroke or Kirfiel died on Orren Hill. We came in boats with dragonheads from the south, and found in Angien a wild folk hiding in woods and sea-caves, a white-faced folk. You know the song, Yahan, the Lay of Orhogien—

  Riding the wind,

  walking the grass,

  skimming the sea,

  toward the star Brehen

  on Lioka’s path…

  Lioka’s path is from the south to the north. And the battles in the song tell how we Angyar fought and conquered the wild hunters, the Olgyior, the only ones of our race in Angien; for we’re all one race, the Liuar. But the song tells nothing of those mountains. It’s an old song, perhaps the beginning is lost. Or perhaps my people came from these foothills. This is a fair country—woods for hunting and hills for herds and heights for fortresses. Yet no men seem to live here now…”

  Yahan did not play his silver-strung lyre that night; and they all slept uneasily, maybe because the windsteeds were gone, and the hills were so deathly still, as if no creature dared move at all by night.

  Agreeing that their camp by the lake was too boggy, they moved on next day, taking it easy and stopping often to hunt and gather fresh herbs. At dusk they came to a hill the top of which was humped and dented, as if under the grass lay the foundations of a fallen building. Nothing was left, yet they could trace or guess where the flightcourt of a little fortress had been, in years so long gone no legend told of it. They camped there, where the windsteeds would find them readily when they returned.

  Late in the long night Rocannon woke and sat up. No moon but little Lioka shone, and the fire was out. They had set no watch. Mogien was standing about fifteen feet away, motionless, a tall vague form in the starlight. Rocannon sleepily watched him, wondering why his cloak made him look so tall and narrow-shouldered. That was not right. The Angyar cloak flared out at the shoulders like a pagoda-roof, and even without his cloak Mogien was notably broad across the chest. Why was he standing there so tall and stooped and lean?

  The face turned slowly, and it was not Mogien’s face.

  “Who’s that?” Rocannon asked, starting up, his voice thick in the dead silence. Beside him Raho sat up, looked around, grabbed his bow and scrambled to his feet. Behind the tall figure something moved slightly—another like it. All around them
, all over the grass-grown ruins in the starlight, stood tall, lean, silent forms, heavily cloaked, with bowed heads. By the cold fire only he and Raho stood.

  “Lord Mogien!” Raho shouted.

  No answer.

  “Where is Mogien? What people are you? Speak—”

  They made no answer, but they began slowly to move forward. Raho nocked an arrow. Still they said nothing, but all at once they expanded weirdly, their cloaks sweeping out on both sides, and attacked from all directions at once, coming in slow, high leaps. As Rocannon fought them he fought to waken from the dream—it must be a dream; their slowness, their silence, it was all unreal, and he could not feel them strike him. But he was wearing his suit. He heard Raho cry out desperately, “Mogien!” The attackers had forced Rocannon down by sheer weight and numbers, and then before he could struggle free again he was lifted up head downward, with a sweeping, sickening movement. As he writhed, trying to get loose from the many hands holding him, he saw starlit hills and woods swinging and rocking beneath him—far beneath. His head swam and he gripped with both hands onto the thin limbs of the creatures that had lifted him. They were all about him, their hands holding him, the air full of black wings beating.