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

She sat up, pulling the blanket around her. The sky was hardly light. The wood lay in blackness. Ahead, the dark smear of sharp peaks rose against a gray horizon, peaks with a shock of snow at the top. To her left, the hill dropped steeply to the valley far below. She could sense, but not yet see, that a river ran there at the bottom like a thin silver thread. Wild land, and huge, rising up to peaks that must surely be a part of the Ring of Fire.

She rose and went barefoot into the shadowed wood where dawn had not yet come, found the stream twisting cold between the roots of ancient trees, washed herself, shivering, kneeling in shallow rapids. When she came out, dawn was beginning to filter into the wood, and the wolves were there among the trees. She pulled the blanket around her, embarrassed at her nakedness, and rubbed herself dry. Only when the wolves had gone, Fawdref dragging the carcass of a deer over his shoulder, did she remove the blanket to pull on her shift. She could sense Ram finishing with the horses, could feel his mood like a dark pall, knew he had waked with the sense of Telien’s captive spirit gripping him. When she returned to the camp, he was surly and rude.

Anchorstar had cooked thin slices of the deer meat on a stick. Ram ate hunched over, not speaking, gulping his food. The morning was bright, the air cold and clear. Skeelie reached out to the aliveness, the wholeness of the rising morning, needing this, needing to put away from her the sense of death and depression Ram carried. Deliberately, she savored the tender deer meat, the tea and warmed bread. But though she tried, she could not rid herself of Ram’s misery. She supposed he knew she shared it. Perhaps that made him surlier still. He tossed down his eating tin finally and rose, glowering at her before he went to untie the horses.

She gazed up at the far peaks, crowned with white, feeling miserable herself suddenly, angry at Ram for making her so, and angrier at herself for letting him. Anchorstar laid a hand on her knee in friendship and understanding. She stared into his strange golden eyes, felt his sympathy. His voice was soft. He glanced once to where Ram had already mounted, then looked ahead to the mountains. “This is strange, wrinkled land. There lies ahead a mountain still hidden, we will come on it as we top the next hills. That is our destination, Esh-nen, a mountain capped with ice but with fires deep in its belly, with a lake like a steaming bath. Well, but you will see.”

When they set out, Ram’s thoughts still ran through Skeelie’s mind and would not be stilled. If the wraith was growing stronger so rapidly that it could now suck out a man’s life, could they hope to defeat it before it destroyed them? It carried Hermeth’s spirit within it now, which made it infinitely stronger; Skeelie remembered its hoarse whisper, there in Gredillon’s house, You will come into me our way, as the others have come Could they, even through the Cutter of Stones, follow and destroy that creature of death? The sense of the wraith closed in around her as they started over a rise of boulders, the horses humping in a lurching gallop against the steepness; and then suddenly, coupled with her worry over the wraith and somehow a part of it, she began to feel Anchorstar’s restlessness, his growing need to return to his own time. She thought that he could sense something amiss there but not discern its shape; she felt a darkness touching him too painful to bring to view.

At midday the riders came over the last of a series of rises and were facing quite suddenly a great white mountain that sprawled just above the hills like an immense reclining animal. “That is Esh-nen,” Anchorstar said. “The white shoulder.” The west wind blew the mountain’s cold breath down to them. “There in Esh-nen the Cutter of Stones dwells in a place out of Time, a place impervious to Time.”

They built a fire for their noon meal and set the meat to cook. Ram stripped the horses to let them graze, then hunched down beside the fire and drew the leather pouch from his tunic. He fished out the three starfires and held them in his palm. They caught the firelight, flashing. He looked up at Anchorstar with taut impatience. “Tell me about the Cutter of Stones. Tell me where he came by the stone from which he cut these, and what he intended for them.”

“The Cutter of Stones himself will tell you what he wishes you to know of the starfires, Ramad.” Anchorstar shrugged, dismissing the subject. Then he looked at Ram and seemed to soften, adding, ‘There were five. I carry one still. And Telien carries the other.”

“And that one has not helped Telien. Perhaps they are cursed stones.”

“I do not think that,” Anchorstar said, then grew silent. When at last he spoke again, his words were harder, clipped, as if he in turn had lost patience. “Where is the runestone, Ramad, that Telien brought out of Tala-charen?”

“I do not know. When I held her close to me there in the wood, I caught a sense of it, quick and fleeting. A sense of it in darkness. Lost. As if Telien herself did not remember where.”

“And if you were made to choose between the search for Telien and the search for the shards of the runestone—which you vowed once, Ramad, that you would join together again—which path would you choose?”

Ram stared at him for so long it seemed he did not mean to answer. At last he rose, still silent, and walked away from them. When he turned back, his scowl was more lonely than angry; and still for a long moment he did not speak. Then he said only, “You know as well as I, what I would do. What I must do. But it does not help to contemplate that pain before—unless—I must.”

He stood silent, seemed to have forgotten them. Then at last, “When I held her, there was a sense of mountains, dark peaks rising. I could feel her despair. I saw the stone in darkness for an instant.” He paused, seemed drawn away suddenly, then he looked across at Anchorstar with surprise. “Words come into my mind. Words—unbidden.” He began to repeat slowly, then with more assurance, in a kind of prophecy that none of them ever afterward could put a name to except, simply, a moment of Seer’s prophecy. “It lies in darkness somewhere, in the north of Cloffi, or in the mountains there.” And then his words became trancelike. “Found by the light of one candle, carried in a searching, and lost in terror. Found again in wonder, given twice, and accompanying a quest and a conquering.” The cold wind touched them, the fire guttered then sprang bright. Never, even in all the violent visions of his childhood, had words of prophecy sprung clearly into Ram’s mind, ringing in his head almost as if spoken by another. Visions had come, scenes, direct knowledge. But not words thundering to be spoken.

He repeated softly the prediction, then turned to Skeelie, suddenly needing her. “Did—could Telien have spoken this into my mind? Could she remember—somehow know . . .?” But then his eyes went dark, his expression turned grim once more. “Telien could not speak such a prediction. She is not a Seer. Such a prediction comes—within a pattern I cannot even imagine. Can any Seer know the pattern by which he takes power?”

Anchorstar emptied the kettle, began to pack up the remains of the meal, then stopped to look at Ram. “A Seer can know the pattern as well, as he knows the pattern of the heavings of the earth and the birth and rebirth of souls. We are a part of something, Ramad. The runestones are a part of it. But what that pattern is, or what made it, we do not know. Why can we three move through Time when all men, even all Seers, cannot?” The white-haired Seer fell silent, caught in his own private sadness.

Skeelie said softly the words of the ancient tree man, “. . . born to weave a new pattern into the fabric of the world. Those so born are not anchored to a single point in Time.” The words of the man who was surely Anchorstar’s sire. Anchorstar looked at her a long time, a deep, puzzled look. She could not read his thoughts, but his face held infinite sadness, as if those words touched a remote place within his soul, a place of everlasting pain.