Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"Be still. Let your mind be silent. See nothing but the flames." The hypnotic smoothness of Ingold's voice filled Rudy's mind as he stared at the brightness of the Guards' campfire by which he sat. He tried to push aside his own chasing thoughts, his fatigue and need for sleep, and his wondering about the White Raiders he thought he'd glimpsed, dogging the line of march. He tried to think of nothing but the fire, to see nothing but the little cluster of sticks, transfigured by the flames and heat. He found that the less he tried to think of something, the stronger it crowded back.

"Relax," Ingold said softly. "Don't worry about anything for the time being. Only look at the fire and breathe."

The wizard turned away to speak to a middle-aged woman who'd appeared on the edge of the Guards' encampment with a sickly-looking young boy in tow.

Doggedly, Rudy tried to obey his last instructions. The cold, overcast daylight was fading out of the sky again, the eighth day from Karst. Voices bickered distantly along the line of the road as thin rations were handed out. Far off he heard the castanet-click of wooden practice swords and the harsh bark of Gnift's sarcasm blistering his exhausted students. Somewhere he heard Alde singing and Tir's little crowing voice joining in, making baby sounds of joy. A feeling went through him such as he'd never known before, a desperate tangle of yearning and relief and affection, and it distracted him hopelessly from the matter at hand.

He glanced up. Ingold was sitting on his heels, looking gravely into the sick youngster's dutifully opened mouth, then into his eyes and ears. The mother wore that harried, angry look so common in the refugee train now. She was looking away, pretending she hadn't brought her son to an old excommunicate wizard; but her eyes slid back to the child, anxious and afraid. There were doctors in the West of the World who were not wizards, but few of them had survived the coming of the Dark. Those few who moved south with the convoy had their hands full, between sickness and exposure, fatigue and starvation; people were not as fastidious about going to a wizard for help as they had once been.

Ingold stood up and spoke briefly to the woman, his hand resting on the boy's dark, ruffled hair. When they had gone, he turned back to Rudy and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

Rudy shrugged helplessly. "What am I supposed to be looking for?" he asked.

Ingold's eyes narrowed. "Nothing. Just look at the fire. See how it shapes itself."

"I have looked," Rudy protested. "And all I see is fire."

"And what," Ingold asked tartly, "did you expect to see?"

"Uh- I mean-" Rudy was conscious of having missed the boat somewhere but wasn't sure where. "I see you watch the fire every night and I know for sure you aren't just watching wood burn."

"No," the wizard said. "And when you've been a wizard for fifty years, maybe you'll see more than that, also. You must love things wholly for their own sake, Rudy, before they will give themselves to you."

"Sometimes I just don't understand," Rudy said much later to Alde, when she'd slipped away from her wagon to sit in the warmth of their shared cloak. "I feel that I should understand all this stuff, but I don't. I don't even know what I don't know-I feel as if I've been dumped in the ocean and I'm trying to swim, but it's a million miles deep. I don't even know how deep it is." He shook his head. "It's crazy. A month ago-" He broke off, unable to explain to this girl, who had grown up knowing kings and mages, that a month ago he would have laughed at anyone claiming to possess such powers.

Her body moved closer to him, her breath a little white mist in the air. Due to the narrowness of the canyons through which the road now wound, the lines of watch fires lay only a dozen paces from the edges of the sleeping convoy, hemmed in by the shoulders of the mountains whose heads were hidden behind towering promontories of granite, furred over with the black of the pine forest. Now and then that day, Rudy had been able to catch glimpses of the higher peaks of the Rampart Range of the Big Snowies gouging the clouds like broken teeth. But mostly he was conscious of the forerunners of that looming range, and the way they overlooked the turnings of the road and hid what lay beyond.

Alde's voice was comforting. "If the water's a million miles deep or only six feet, all you have to do is to keep your head above it," she said. "For an outlander, you're doing well." And her arm tightened around his waist.

He grinned at her and returned the pressure gently. "For an outlander, I'm doing fantastic," he said. He shifted his arm around her shoulders to look at the tattoo on his wrist.

Alde noticed the movement and looked, too, "What's that for?" she asked.

He chuckled. "Just thinking. A girl I knew used to tease me about my tattoo. That's my name on the banner there across the torch. She used to say I got it so I could remember who I was, if I ever forgot."

"And do you need to be reminded?"

He looked out for a moment into the bitter stillness of the alien night, then up to the great, burning stars. His ears caught the distant howling of wolves. All the scents of the looming mountains came to him, shrub and pine, rock and water. The long hilt of the killing sword lying close by his right hand reflected the dim sheen of firelight, as did the braided hair of the woman curled, warm and fragile as a captive bird, in the circle of his other arm. He remembered, as if in an old legend, a sunburned California youth in a garish pachuco jacket, painting vans in a body shop. About the only thing they had in common, he reflected, was the tattoo.

"Yeah," he said softly. "Yeah, sometimes I do."

"I know what you feel," she murmured. "Sometimes I think I need reminding myself."

"What was it like," he asked, "to be Queen?"

She was so long silent that he was afraid he had hurt her by asking. But looking over at her face, profiled against the dim rose-amber of the fire, he saw in her eyes instead a kind of dreamy nostalgia, of memories whose beauty overrode their pain.

"It was very beautiful," she said at last. "I remember-dancing, and the hall all lit with candles, the way the flames would all ripple in unison with the movement of the ladies' dresses. The smell of the warm nights, lemonflowers and spice perfumes, coming up-river on the royal barge and the water stairs of the Palace all lit like a jewelbox, golden in the darkness. Having my own household, my own gardens, the freedom to do what I wanted." She rested her head against his shoulder, the looped braids that bound her hair as smooth as satin under his jaw and gleaming like ebony. "Maybe it would have been the same, no matter whom I married," she went on softly. "Maybe it wasn't so much being Queen as having my own place to be." Her voice was wistful. "I'm really a very happy person, you know. All I want is to take life as it comes, to be at peace, with small things, small joys. I'm not really a stubborn, bloodthirsty hellion... "

"Oh, yes, you are," he teased her, holding her close. She raised her eyes to his reproachfully. "And I love you anyway. Maybe I love you because of it. I don't know. Sometimes I don't think there is any why in love. I just do."

Her arms tightened convulsively around his ribs, and she turned her face away, burying it in his shoulder. After a moment he realized that she was crying.

"Hey... " He turned under the weight of the cloak and stroked her shivering shoulders tenderly. "Hey, you can't cry on guard duty." The cloak slithered down as he raised his hands and caressed her bowed head with its gleaming, twisted braids. "Hey, what is it, Alde?"

"It's nothing," she whispered, and began wiping futilely at her eyes with the back of her hand. "It's just that nobody ever said that to me before. I'm sorry, I won't be stupid like this again." She fumbled at the fallen cloak, her face averted and wet with tears.