Ширли Мерфи - The Castle Оf Hape. Caves Оf Fire Аnd Ice. The Joining Оf Тhe Stone

Where one guard stood with his back to them, the stallion came noiselessly down out of the sky to land without a stir of air.

Ram sized up the man’s height and width of shoulder. Yes, these clothes would do fine. His pulse quickened. He poised ready, moved silently.

Ram took the guard’s clothes and left him naked and unconscious in a tangle of sablevine; fingered the weapons and was glad he had left a few in Kubal. Now, perhaps, the Kubalese would learn to hunt with clubs. When he turned to the silver stallion, he stood with his hand on the great horse’s neck, tried to reach out to Telien, to sense her somewhere in those mountains, and could not.

“Can you find her, Dalwyn? If she lives among those fires, can you find her? Can you sense the red stallion and his mare?”

Dalwyn turned to stare toward the dark mountains. He would try. His every nerve went taut, trying to sense Rougier and Meheegan, to sense the invisible. They would go among the mountains. They would try.

Ram knelt beside a spring and washed and drank. He smelled the stink of the borrowed clothes, made a face, wished he had found a cleaner guard.

Dalwyn was sloshing and drinking, enjoying the water thoroughly. Ram’s wonder was never diminished that even this horselike action was as a man would do, that every action of the horses of Eresu was a sentient, balanced action, unhorselike in the extreme. The stallion turned to him at last; Ram swung himself up, and they leaped skyward so fast he was almost unseated, heading at once into deep smoke and heat.

On the land beneath them, smoking lava lay cooling, little flames licking out where grass and bushes still burned. As they rose toward the higher peaks, Ram prayed for Telien. And prayed that if she had died, it was quickly and without pain.

To think of her dead was unbearable; Telien could not be dead. He would know in the same way he had known, when first he saw her, that they were linked in a way he might never understand. Telien had never really left him since that moment on Tala-charen. All the women he had known since had been judged against her. Skeelie had been judged against her, good, faithful Skeelie whom he otherwise might have loved; Skeelie, who was his sister, his mother, his friend, but never anything more—because of Telien.

*

It was dawn on the road between the ruins and Blackcob. Skeelie and the old Seer, Berd, and a few soldiers rode hunched over, sleepy, sated with a huge breakfast. They had left in darkness, the pack horses only black lumps at the ends of their lead ropes; desperate to get to Blackcob because they knew there would be a need there. They rode now along the edge of the dark sea, the breakers making a pattern of white movement against darkness. The sea’s pounding seemed not a part of that pattern, seemed a delayed echo from the recent wild thunder of the mountains.

What they would find in Blackcob was largely unclear. They had watched all night the fiery sky, heard the rattling cries of the mountains. But only glimpses had come to them of the seething land itself. Skeelie had held for one brief instant a clear vision of Ram leaping skyward from Burgdeeth amidst the fiery sky, had known with elation Ram’s victory and the victory of the gods of Eresu—Carriol’s victory over Venniver’s sadism. She stared ahead in the direction of Blackcob, buoyed by this victory against the pain that awaited her there. She could not extricate herself from the blackness into which she had been driven when first she heard, from the refugees coming out of Blackcob, that Ram had found Telien. She had turned away, fists clenched, when they spoke of the two of them whispering together their good-byes.

Ram would be coming to Blackcob, she knew that clearly. How or why, she did not know. But she must see him once more. See for herself that he was lost to her. She pulled her cape around her, found she was hugging herself in a desolate passion of loneliness.

Yet still hope rose in spite of logic, and she rode for Blackcob with some wild unexamined notion that maybe . . . maybe . . .

She knew Ram would ride for Blackcob strung tight with some urgent need, come there in wild desperation. And when she was honest with herself, she had to wonder: Did she ride for Blackcob with the hope that Ram would come there in grief, having lost Telien to the holocaust of the mountains? Yes, if she was honest, she knew she wished Telien dead. Wished her gone, and wished to console Ram in his sorrow.

Yet Telien’s death would make no difference; Ram would love Telien, not until she died, but until he died.

Tears touched her cheeks. No matter the pain of her jealousy, she wanted no pain for Ram. No matter her own sorrow, underneath her hatred she wanted Telien to live—for Ram. For Ram to be happy. Wanting that, Skeelie was more miserable than ever.

She had insisted on going, had stared into Jerthon’s eyes with fine defiance and seen his hurt for her, had sworn at him for a fool. “I don’t go because of Ram! I go because they will need me. If there are wounded, burned from the fire . . .

“You go because Ram will come there, Skeelie girl. And you . . .” He had left the rest unsaid. Great fires of Urdd! Sometimes she wished they were none of them Seers and could never, never see into the mind of another!

*

The stallion changed direction suddenly, seeking over the fiery land, winged over and down into a blast of hot wind then through a narrow valley, rock walls rising beside them. Ram clung, saw not the walls or the smokey sky, Saw a clear vision suddenly of Telien kneeling, white and sick, beside the newborn foal. He heard Telien’s thoughts as if they were his own: was death the same as birth? Was death, too, a wild struggling after a mystery we cannot know, can only sense? He shouted into the hot wind, “Don’t speak of death! Don’t think of death!” And only the stallion heard him.

He felt the stallion sweep suddenly in a different direction, seeking again, disoriented and unable to touch the others with his thoughts. The great horse’s direction was confused and uncertain. They soared low between mountains where smoke still rose sullenly, dropped down across a valley that steamed from the cooling lava. Everywhere there was lava going gray, burned brush and trees. The sweating stallion moved with the same uncertainty that a crippled bat might move, sensing his direction then foiled of it suddenly, blinded again so his course changed, changed again. Dalwyn grew weary, his wings heavy; the hot air did not hold him well. He came down at last to rest.

It was well after midday. Ram dismounted beside a stream bed dried up, the land above it charred. Between ancient boulders he found a protected place where the heat had not come so fiercely and dug with his knife until at last he uncovered a bit of dampness. They waited for an interminable time until the water had oozed up to make a small pool from which Dalwyn could drink. Ram said, “You cannot hold the sense of the red stallion, Dalwyn. Will we ever find them?”

Dalwyn lifted his head. He did not know. Rougier would come into his mind then fade at once, and Dalwyn’s idea of the direction would twist and become confused. He was as the hunting birds of old Opensa that were whirled around in baskets until they had no notion of which way were their eyries, and so returned to their masters at last in confused submission.

So were the dark Seers confusing Dalwyn now.

“But why? Such a little thing as finding Telien . . . Ram stared at the stallion with rising anger. “Why should BroogArl care if . . .” Then he stiffened. Why should BroogArl care? And why should he not care? It was Telien— Telien who would bring another stone into Ere!

Of course BroogArl wanted her lost. Lost to Ram and to Ere, forever. Ram laid a hand on Dalwyn’s withers, touched his sweating sides. “We must find her, and soon.” He took off his jerkin and began to rub the stallion down, wiping away sweat, smoothing his coat. When water had seeped again into the cupped sand, Dalwyn drank a second time, then they were off, Ram forcing his powers now against BroogArl, against the Hape, in an aching effort to stay the dark while Dalwyn circled, sought out Rougier, and swept off in a direction from which they had recently come. The air was smokey, drifting with ash, so hot in some places, that their vision was blurred. Ram held with great effort against the dark, felt the strength of the wolf bell sustaining him, held so until at last Dalwyn swept down suddenly and surely to the mouth of a cave high in a dark peak, and Ram knew she was there, could sense her there.