C. Cherryh - Gate of Ivrel

“I am human born,” he said, and returned their bows of farewell. “Brothers,” he added when they began to turn away. They looked back, suntanned faces and gentle eyes and patient manner all one, as if one heart animated them. “Pray for me,” he said; and then because some charity on his part was usually granted for that: “I have no alms to give you.”

They bowed together. “That is of no account. We will pray for you,” said one. And they went away.

The sunshine felt cold when they had done so. He could not sleep, and watched far beyond the time that he should have called Ryn to take his place. As last, when he was very weary, he went down the steps and gathered up the earthen jars and took them inside, letting Ryn replace him on the step.

Morgaine wakened. There was black bread and honey and salted butter, a crock of broth and another of boiled beans, which both were cooling, but wonderful to Morgaine, whose fare had been less delicate than his the last many days, he suspected; and he took Ryn his portion out upon the step, and the youth ate as if he were famished.

The Brothers brought down great armloads of hay and buckets of grain for their horses, which Vanye saw to, storing the grain in saddlebags against future need; and in the peace of the evening, with the sun headed toward the western mountains, Ryn sat in the little doorway and took his harp and played quiet songs, his sensitive fingers tuning and meddling with the strings in such a way that even that seemed pleasant. Some of the Brothers came down from the hill to stand by the gate and listen to the harper. Ryn smiled at them in an absent way. But they grew grave and sober-eyed when Morgaine appeared in the door; some blessed themselves in dread of her, and this seemed greatly to sadden her. She bowed them courtesy all the same, which most returned, and retired to the inner hearth, and the warmth of the fire.

“We must be out of this place tonight,” she said when Vanye knelt there beside her.

He was surprised. “ Liyo , there is no safer place for us to be.”

“I am not looking for a refuge: my aim is Ivrel, and that is all. This is my order, Vanye.”

“Aye,” he said, and bowed. She looked at him when he straightened again and frowned.

“What is this?” she asked of him, and gestured toward the back of her own neck, and his hand lifted, encountered the ragged edge of his hair, and his face went hot.

“Do not ask me,” he said.

“Thee is ilin ,” she said, a tone that reproved such a shameful thing. And then: “Was it done, or did thee—”

“It was my choice.”

“What chanced in Ra-morij, between you and your brother?”

“Do you bid me straightly tell you?”

Her lips tightened, her gray eyes bore into him, perhaps reading misery. “No,” she said.

It was not like her to leave things unknown, where it might touch her safety. He acknowledged her trust, grateful for it, and settled against the warm stones of the hearth, listening to the harp, watching Ryn’s rapt face silhouetted against the dying light, the pine-dotted hill beyond, the monastery and church with the bell-tower. This was beauty, earthly and not, the boy with the harp. The song paused briefly: a lock of hair fell across Ryn’s face and he brushed it back, anchored it behind an ear. Not yet of the warriors, this youth, but about to be, when he made choice. His honor, his pride, were both untouched.

The hands resumed their rippling play over the strings, quiet, pleasant songs, in tribute to the place, and to the Brothers, who listened.

Then the vesper bell sounded, drawing the gray lines of monks back into their holiness on the hill, and the light began to leave them quickly.

They finished the food the Brothers gave them, and gave themselves by turns to sleep for most of the night.

Then Morgaine, whose watch it was, shook them and bade them up and make ready.

The red line of dawn was appearing on the horizon.

They were quickly armed and the horses saddled, and Morgaine warmed herself a last time by the fire and looked about the room, seeming distressed. “I do not think that they would have any parting-gift of me,” she said at last. “And there is nothing I have anyway.”

“They bade us be free of the matter,” Vanye assured her, and it was certain that his own gear was innocent of anything valuable to the Brothers.

Ryn searched his own things, took out a few coins and left them on the bed, a few pennies—it was all.

It was upon the road with the morning light still barely bringing color to things that Vanye remembered the harp, and did not find it about the person of Ryn.

There was instead only the bow slung from his shoulders, and he was strangely sorry for that. Later he saw Morgaine realize the same thing, and open her lips to speak; but she did not. It was Ryn’s choice.

It was said by men of Baien that Baien-an was a fragment left from the making of Heaven. However that was, it was true that this place surpassed even Morija for fairness. Winter though it was, the golden grass and green cedar gave it grace, and the mighty range of Kath Vrej and Kath Svejur embraced the valley with great ridges crowned with snow. There was a straight road, with hedges beside it—one did not see hedges kept so anywhere else but in Baien—and twice they saw villages off the road, golden-thatched and somnolent in the wintry sun, with white flocks of sheep grazing near like errant clouds.

And once they must pass through a village, where children huddled wide-eyed at their mothers’ skirts and men paused with their work in hand, as if they were held between rushing to arms or bidding them good day. Morgaine kept her hood upon her at that time, but if there was not the strangeness of her, riding astride and with a sword-sheath under her knee, there was Siptah himself, who had been foaled in this land, before all the great herd of king Tiffwy had been taken by Hjemur’s bandits. Mischance had befallen them, and they had been seen no more: Baienen said that it was because they were the horses of kings, and would not carry the likes of their Hjemurn masters.

But perhaps the villagers blinked again in the sunlight, and persuaded themselves that they had no proper business with travelers going east: it was only those who came from it, out of Hjemur, that need trouble them to take arms; and there were gray horses foaled who were not of the old blood. Siptah had grown leaner; he was muddy about legs and belly; and he spent none of his strength on high-blooded skittishness, although his ears pricked up toward any chance move and his nostrils drank in every smell.

“ Liyo ,” said Vanye when they were quit of the town, “they will hear of us in Ra-baien by evening.”

“By evening,” she said, “surely we will be in those hills.”

“If we had turned aside there, and sought welcome at Ra-baien,” he insisted, “they might have taken you in.”

“As they did in Ra-morij?” she answered him. “No. And I will accept no more delays.”

“What is our haste?” he protested. “Lady, we are all tired, you not least of all. After a hundred years of delay, what is a day to rest? We should have stayed at the Monastery.”

“Are you fit to ride?”

“I am fit,” he acknowledged, which was, under less compulsion, a lie. He ached, his bones ached, but he was well sure that she was in no better case, and shame kept him from pleading his own. She had that fever in her again, that burning compulsion toward Ivrel; he knew how it was to stand in the way of that, and if she would not be reasoned into delay, it was sure that there was little else would stop her.

Then, when the sun was at their backs, reddening into evening upon the snows of Kath Svejur before them, Vanye looked back along the road they had come as he did from time to time.