Patricia McKillip - Harpist In The Wind

“You aren’t exactly inconspicuous. You may be dressed like a poor farmer, but you walk like a land-ruler, and your eyes could quarry stone.”

“Watch,” he said. He let himself grow still, his thoughts shaping themselves to his surroundings: wood, pitch, the vague murmur of water and indistinct rumblings of the harbor. His name seemed to flow away from him into the heat. His face held no discernible expression; for a moment his eyes were vague, blank as the summer sky.

“If you aren’t aware of yourself, few people will be aware of you. That’s one of a hundred ways I kept myself alive crossing the realm.”

She looked startled. “I almost couldn’t recognize you. Is it illusion?”

“Very little of it; It’s survival.”

She was silent. He saw the conflict of her thoughts in her face. She turned away without speaking and climbed up the ladder to the deck.

The sun was burning into night at the far edge of the realm as they bade farewell to Bri and began to ride. Great shadows from masts and piled cargo loomed in their path across the docks. The city, a haze of late light and shadow, seemed suddenly unfamiliar to Morgon, as if, on the verge of taking a strange road, he became a stranger to himself. He led Raederle through the twists of streets, past shops and taverns he had known once, toward the west edge of the city, down one cobbled street that widened as it left the city, wore out of its cobblestones, widened again, rutted with centuries of cartwheels, widened again and ran ahead of them through hundreds of miles of no-man’s-land, until it angled northward at the edge of the known realm towards Lungold.

They stopped their horses, looking down it. Tangled shadows of oak faded as the sun set; the road lay tired, grey, and endless in the dusk. The oak fanned over their heads, branches nearly joined across the road. They looked weary, their leaves dulled with a patina of dust kicked up by the cartwheels. The evening was very quiet; the late traffic had already wound its way into the city. The forests blurred grey in the distance, and then dark. From the greyness an owl woke and sang a riddle.

They began to ride again. The sky turned black, and the moon rose, spilling a milky light through the forest. They rode the moon high, until their shadows rode beneath them on a tangle of black leaves. Then Morgon found the leaves blurring together into one vast darkness under his eyes. He reined; Raederle stopped beside him.

There was the sound of water not far away. Morgon, his face coated with a mask of dust, said tiredly, “I remember. I crossed a river, coming south out of Wind Plain. It must follow the road.” He turned his horse off the road. “We can camp there.”

They found it not far from the road, a shallow streak of silver in the moonlight. Raederle sank down at the foot of a tree while Morgon unsaddled the horses and let them drink. He brought their packs and blankets to a clear space among the fern. Then he sat down beside Raederle, dropped his head in his arms.

“I’m not used to riding, either,” he said. She took her hat off, rested her head against him.

“A plow horse,” she murmured. She fell asleep where she sat. Morgon put his arm around her. For a while he stayed awake, listening. But he heard only the secret noises of hunting animals, the breath of owl’s wings, and as the moon set, his eyes closed.

They woke to the blaze of the summer sun and the tortured groan of cartwheels. By the time they had eaten, washed, and made their way back to the road, it was filled with carts, traders on horseback with their packs, farmers taking produce or animals from outlying farms into Caithnard, men and women with retinues and packhorses making the long journey, for indiscernible reasons, across the realm to Lungold. Morgon and Raederle eased their horses into the slow, rhythmic pace that would wear the monotonous, six-weeks journey to its ending. Riding in traffic varying between pigs and rich lords, they were not conspicuous. Morgon discouraged traders’ idle conversation, responding grumpily to their overtures. Once he startled Raederle by cursing a rich merchant who commented on her face. The man looked angry a moment, his hand tightening on his riding crop; then, glancing at Morgon’s patched boots and the sweat beading his dusty face, he laughed, nodded to Raederle, and passed on. Raederle rode in silence, her head bowed, her reins bunched in one fist. Morgon, wondering what she was thinking, reached across and touched her lightly. She looked at him, her face filmed with dust and weariness.

He said softly, “This is your choice.”

She met his eyes without answering. She sighed finally, and her grip on the reins loosened. “Do you know the ninety-nine curses the witch Madir set on a man for stealing one of her pigs?”

“No.”

“I’ll teach you. In six weeks you might run out of curses.”

“Raederle—”

“Stop asking me to be reasonable.”

“I didn’t ask you!”

’’You asked me with your eyes.”

He swept a hand through his hair. “You are so unreasonable sometimes that you remind me of me. Teach me the ninety-nine curses. I’ll have something to think about while I m eating road dust all the way to Lungold.”

She was silent again, her face hidden under the shadow of her hat brim. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The merchant frightened me. He might have hurt you. I know I am a danger to you, but I didn’t realize it before. But Morgon, I can’t… I can’t—”

“So. Run from your shadow. Maybe you’ll succeed better than I did.” Her face turned away from him. He rode without speaking, watching the sun burn across bands of metal on wine barrels ahead of them. He put a hand over his eyes finally, to shut out the hot flare of light. “Raederle,” he said in the darkness, “I don’t care. Not for myself. If there is a way to keep you safely with me, I’ll find it. You are real, beside me. I can touch you. I can love you. For a year, in that mountain, I never touched anyone. There is nothing I can see ahead of me that I could love. Even the children who named me are dead. If you had chosen to wait for me in Anuin, I would be wondering what the wait would be worth for either of us. But you’re with me, and you drag my thoughts out of a hopeless future always back to this moment, back to you — so that I can find some perverse contentment even in swallowing road dust.” He looked at her. “Teach me the ninety-nine curses.”

“I can’t.” He could barely hear her voice. “You made me forget how to curse.”

But he coaxed them from her later, to while away the long afternoon. She taught him sixty-four curses before twilight fell, a varied, detailed list that covered the pig thief from hair to toenails, and eventually transformed him into a boar. They left the road then, found the river fifty yards from it. There were no inns or villages nearby, so the travellers moving at the same pace down the long road were camped all around them. The evening was full of distant laughter, music, the smell of wood burning, meat roasting. Morgon went upriver a way, caught fish with his hands. He cleaned them, stuffed them with wild onions, and brought them back to their camp. Raederle had bathed and started a fire; she sat beside it, combing her wet hair. Seeing her in the circle of her light, stepping into it himself and watching her lower her comb and smile, he felt ninety-nine curses at his own ungentleness march into his throat. She saw it in his face, her expression changing as he knelt beside her. He set the fish, wrapped in leaves, at her feet like an offering. Her fingers traced his cheekbone and his mouth.

He whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“For what? Being right? What did you bring me?” She opened a leaf wonderingly. “Fish.” He cursed himself again, silently. She lifted his face in her hands and kissed him again and again, until the dust and weariness of the day vanished from his mind, and the long road burned like a streak of light among his memories.