In the Red Lord's Reach Page 18

  She looked into his eyes, and her own were wide and wild, like some mountain cat's. "I won't let you go. I won't!"

  He shook his head. "This is important to her. She must be sure of me. I don't want her to look on me as a rival."

  "Why not? A little competition might do her good. She's been the most important person in the north long enough!"

  He smiled and kissed her cheek. "You're the one who'll be her competition someday. You have the fire for it. But I am just a minstrel." And when she would have answered that, he set two hushing fingers against her lips. "No, don't say I'm more. I won't be more." He kissed her again. "And I'll have peace between myself and your mother so that you and I can be happy."

  She clung to him. "You'll be careful, won't you? I've heard stories about the Waste. They say the rocks reach out and seize you as you pass. They say the very ground can open and swallow you up."

  "I'll be careful. After all, I value myself even more than you do."

  "That can't be possible," she said fiercely.

  ****

  WHEN THE MEAT was dried nearly as hard as wood, Kata's small company made ready to leave the band. The four who had made the journey with her before were strong men, hunters all. The youngest, Grem, was nearly old enough to be Alaric's father; the others, Lanri, Velet, and Oltavin, had grandchildren already. None bore sole responsibility for a family, in case, Kata said, they never came back.

  They had two tents among them, one for the men and a smaller one for Kata alone—special tents, marked on their sides and roofs with the symbol of the Pole Star, guardian of their journey. These, and food and hooded furs and the many well-wrapped bundles that belonged to Kata, were enough to load all of their riding deer and three pack animals besides. They were leaving behind all metal save for their short knives, the men even trading their fine barbed hunting arrows for stone-tipped shafts fashioned by Kata herself; metal, Grem said, could not be trusted in the far north. And though it was not metal save for its strings, Alaric had to leave the lute behind as well, for Kata insisted there would be neither time nor strength for song on their journey. He doubted that, but he said nothing, understanding that she would be jealous of everything about him on this trip, everything that might detract, however little, from her own importance.

  They set out just past noon, when the band had stopped for the day and the midday meal was finished. Once more, as when Simir himself had ridden south, the nomads clustered to bid farewell to their far travelers. But this time there was cheer among them, loud good wishes for a swift journey, and kisses for the men. And this time it was Alaric who was leaving, and Simir and Zavia who walked out onto the plain after him as if they would follow. He saw them still standing there every time he turned to wave, and he turned a dozen times and more, till they had dwindled to a pair of dots on the landscape, and he could no longer make out their lifted arms. Only then did the last small pang in his heart give way to a buoyant curiosity as he set his eyes firmly on the north.

  They rode silent and steady, the six of them, with Kata in the lead. They rode through the whole long summer day, eating their dried meat on deer-back, stopping only for water and to answer nature's calls, and by dusk they had traveled farther than in three or four days of nomad wandering. After tethering their deer by long ropes that would let the animals graze, they set up their tents, their two tiny shelters upon that vast rolling plain of grass; they did not bother making a fire. But before they curled up to sleep the brief darkness away, Kata made them all bow to the north, and she took off the large brooch she had donned for the journey, a brooch with the symbol of the Pole Star worked in gold wire within its circle, and she held it out to the sky as they bowed, as if offering it to the first faint glimmer of its namesake.

  The next day they set off at dawn and rode till twilight, and the next, and the next, and soon the days began to blend together for Alaric. One stretch of rolling plain seemed like another, one meandering watercourse, with its accompanying double file of trees, twin to the last. And yet one day—it might have been ten days after they left the band, or eleven—they crossed a stream where the trees were unusually short. That was also the day Alaric realized that, bright and hot as the summer sun might be, the wind—when it blew from the north—was chill. At the next stream, the trees were not merely short, but sparse and weirdly stunted, their trunks growing sideways, almost hard against the ground, their boughs gnarled and twisted, like thick, exposed roots with a scanty covering of leafy twigs. If Grem had not told him these strange plants were trees, Alaric would scarcely have guessed it.

  "And that's the last of them," Grem said, and it was true. Beyond, the river made a long, sweeping northward curve, and its banks were open, covered with short grass, wild flowers, and herbs; there was not a tree in sight to the horizon.

  The plain grew boggy after that, and the grass thinned, exposing great open patches of sandy soil, ridges of gravel, and boulders marked by growing things as if by daubs of paint. A thousand ponds dotted the landscape, and by night the wind from the north, blowing ever stronger, ever colder, would rime them with ice. The daylight that thawed the ice now lasted longer than Alaric could ever remember, the sun easing to its rest at such a shallow angle to the horizon that it seemed reluctant to leave the sky; and in its wake, twilight seemed nearly endless. The travelers began camping before sunset and sleeping well past dawn, else they would have been too tired to ride through the day.

  At last, mountains appeared in the distance.

  Kata called a halt as soon as the peaks were plain to see—jagged peaks, steep and dark and forbidding, stretching far to the east and west, like a vast line of spears draped loosely with black canvas.

  "This is the first magical region on our journey," she said to Alaric. "Be sure your knife is well secured."

  He glanced down at the blade, which sat firmly in its sheath, as always. But that was not enough for Kata. She motioned to Grem, who helped Alaric lash it fast with thongs so that he could not draw it without untying them. Grem's own knife was already bound in the same fashion.

  "Don't try to use it till I give you leave," Kata said.

  "Is this the place where metal can't be trusted?" Alaric asked.

  She nodded. Then, reaching into the bundle that hung behind her right leg, she pulled out a small metal box. It was a cunningly made container, a trifle larger than her fingers could span, its sides polished mirror-bright, its top chased with the symbol of the Pole Star. Tilting back the lid revealed that the metal walls were thick, leaving only a tiny space inside, which, save for a lining of dark velvet, was empty. Kata unpinned the brooch she wore upon her bosom, set it in the velvet, and shut the lid over it. Then she slipped the box into its bundle.

  "Is gold even less trustworthy than steel?" Alaric wondered.

  She cast him a cold glance. "The Pole Star looks after its own," she said. "Be it metal or flesh." Then she gave him a longer look. "Perhaps we would both do well to remember that."

  He smiled slightly, thinking of the symbols on their tents. "I remember it every night."

  At his smile, her lips had tightened, but she said no more, only raised her arm to signal the resumption of their journey.

  The mountains looked high at first, and very far away, but Alaric soon realized that was just an illusion. Rugged they were, as if some enormous ax had hewn them out, but they were neither distant nor lofty. They were, in fact, mountains in miniature; he had seen man-built towers taller, and castle keeps with as much girth. He and his companions rode like giants through the narrow passes, and they could have shot their arrows over the peaks.

  But the strangest aspect of those mountains was not their size, but their particular form. They were barren, with not a tuft of grass, not a leaf, clinging to their slopes; and everywhere the naked rocks were split and broken into countless points and serrations, like myriad fingers reaching for the sky. Streaked with shades of red and rust and brown and a steely gray so dark it was almost black, those stony ramparts
showed a single texture everywhere, a striated surface, a grain that looked almost to be carved upon them by a sculptor's tool. And all the striations, all the shards and all the ridges, were precisely aligned, all of them tilted from the vertical, so that the whole range of miniature mountains was tipped to the south, bristling toward the travelers like an irregular palisade of sharpened stakes.

  Alaric rode through them wide-eyed and wondering, and once he brushed so close to an outcropping that he could not resist reaching out to touch it. He caught at a needlelike shard, intending to break it off, but fragile though it seemed, it would not come loose. Then Grem, riding behind him, called to him to leave it be, and Kata turned and said the same, but sharper.

  "This magic we don't take away with us," she told him.

  "Is it magic?" he wondered. "Yes, if there is any true magic in the world, it must be here. But of what sort?"

  Kata's mouth made the smallest of smiles. "There is more true magic in the world than you can guess, my Alaric, and this is the least of it." From one of her bundles, she drew an arrow, not a stone-tipped one, but one of the ordinary arrows the nomads made, with a point of steel. She tossed the shaft to Land, saying, "Here, show him the faithlessness of metal."

  Land fitted the arrow to his bow and, pointing to a spot of reddish stone, an easy target not far off, loosed h. But the shaft never reached its goal; instead, it swerved in midflight and struck dark stone much nearer. Struck and clung to the rock face as if glued there, barbed tip and shaft both hard against the stone and nearly horizontal.

  Alaric rode up to the arrow and, wrapping his fingers about the shaft, gave it a sharp tug. But all his strength merely cracked the wood just behind the barbs; the steel tip was caught fast, though nothing visible was holding it.

  "Lodestone," said Alaric. He turned to the others. "Are all these mountains lodestones?"

  "So you know something of lodestones, do you?" Kata said, the smile gone from her lips.

  "I've seen small ones that would fit in my hand. Children's toys, they are in the south. Except in one place, where a man I met once, who called himself a witch, ground them up and used them for spell casting."

  "Spell casting?" She leaned forward between her deer's antlers. "What sort of spell casting?"

  "Several different sorts." He shrugged. "But as far as I could see, none of them ever came to anything, except in his mind."

  She straightened abruptly. "Bah. The witches of the south are fools."

  "I've long thought that, lady."

  "We have the true magic here in the north, my Alaric. Don't think otherwise. These"—she waved to encompass all the harsh, low mountains—"these are the guardians of that magic. Beyond lies a land such as you have never dreamed."

  "I look forward to it."

  Her frown was as small as her smile. "It pleases me," she said, "that you are not afraid."

  He bowed to her.

  ****

  THEY PASSED THROUGH the miniature mountains in a single long day's ride, but beyond, at least for a time, lay no strange and frightening land but merely more of the boggy plain. When the mountains were well behind them, Kata brought out her brooch once more, offering it with open hands to the north before fastening it to her jerkin. Then the long dull journey resumed, interrupted only by sleep and, once, by Grem's deer getting stuck in a muddy pond.

  Alaric scarcely noticed the whiteness in the distance. He thought it was a cloud bank, like so many others in the pale northern sky. But he noticed the wind, which was now bitter by night, and so chill even during the day that the travelers had begun to wear their furs. He did not think of the whiteness as a source of that cold, even though it loomed larger ahead of them day by day, never moving, as if waiting for them. Only when they were almost upon it did he realize that the whiteness was an enormous wall of ice.

  Higher than the lodestone mountains, higher than any human-built rampart, the wall swept eastward to the limit of vision. Its face was a slope of icy rubble, of tumbled, broken blocks as big as a peasant's hut, part melted by the summer sun and refrozen by the cold wind into fantastical shapes. To the west, the barrier thrust abruptly into a great gray sea whose steep and rugged verge then angled away southwestwardly; and upon that sullen surface floated fallen icy chunks of every size, like gobbets of bread in a vast dish of soup. As the travelers watched, standing a hundred paces back from the shore, a huge white slab broke free of the wall of ice and slid with a great thundering crash into the water, raising a wave that washed up almost to their feet.

  "The Northern Sea," said Kata. "Well, my Alaric, your wish is granted at last."

  He looked up, up at the white barrier. "There is no song to describe this, lady. No minstrel has ever seen this sight. Or none that thought anyone would believe him." He glanced sidelong at her. "Do we turn east now?"

  "No," she said, and she pointed to the broken face of the wall. "We climb."

  Only five of them went, with furs wrapped snug about them, and no baggage but some coils of rope. Had Alaric not given his promise, he would have flashed to the top of that icy rampart in a heartbeat. Still, it was not a bad climb, not after Kata had lashed wooden cleats to their boots and passed around tent pegs to be hammered into the ice for support. The surface was well compacted, almost as firm underfoot as stone and soil, and in most places no more treacherous than many a mountain slope. Only where meltwater had gathered in a hollow or spread in a thin layer across some level space was there real danger of slipping; but Lanri, in the lead, warned of every such place, and they reached their goal with nothing worse to show for the climb than a few bruised shins.

  Atop the wall, Alaric found himself at the edge of a new world. To the south stretched the pond-dotted plain, to the west the ice-scattered sea; and to the north the ice beneath his feet was the beginning of a landscape flatter than any grassland, and of a white so intense, so brilliant beneath the afternoon sun, that it pained the eyes to look upon. The wall had been no barrier to the farther north at all; rather, it was the farther north, with not a blade of grass, not a flower, on its bosom to the horizon.

  "The Great Waste," said Kata, encompassing it with a hand.

  Oltavin had stayed below with the supplies; now the others tied their ropes end to end and let the line down so that he could send packs up to them for the final leg of their journey. He would be remaining behind, where the deer could graze, while they continued north.

  Well prepared for this new world, Kata had stiff muslin masks, darkly translucent, to shield their eyes against the glare; and strange wooden hoops, webbed with thongs, to lash to their boots for walking across the crusty frozen surface. Alaric was grateful for the mask, less so for the new footgear; the hoops tripped him again and again before he learned the knack of widening his stride to accommodate them. It seemed a tiring way to walk, till he tried without them and found himself sinking ankle-deep into the treacherous surface, or turning a foot painfully against unexpected solidity. Tiring, too, was the heavy pack he carried; and now he was glad that Kata had made him leave the lute behind, because he knew, as much as he loved that instrument, he would have begrudged its extra burden.

  They walked late that day, later than they had ever ridden on their deer, Alaric thought, though he could only gauge the time by the exhaustion in his legs. Darkness no longer marked an end to the day; the sun, after sinking and sinking toward the ice, barely touched the horizon and then began to rise again, as if repelled by the cold. The travelers stopped at last, set up their tents, and slept till Kata woke them; and the sun stood high and bright for the beginning of their next march. Thereafter, it was always above the horizon, riding an enormous circular path in the sky; and it seemed to Alaric that on the Great Waste, he and his companions were walking, sleeping, walking on, all in a single endless day.

  Kata led the way steadily northward. Most people, Alaric knew, would have lost all sense of direction by now, with no stars to guide them, and the sun behaving so strangely, and not a landmark anywhere
. He had not; his sense of direction did not depend on external guideposts, but on an instinctive awareness of his own movements, of every step, every turn, every measure traversed in his special way; it was of a piece with his witch's power, born to him. For a time, he thought Kata must have it, too, and then, walking close beside her, he watched her hold her brooch out to the north… and he saw what had escaped him till now. At the touch of her thumb, a tiny post thrust up from the center of the ornament, bringing with it a flattened needle that had been resting nearly invisible upon the device of the Pole Star. Pierced midway along its length by the post, the needle swung freely on that pivot, and no matter how Kata turned the brooch, the needle's point always bore to the north.

  She noticed him staring at it, or at least noticed his mask turned in the direction of her hand. "Do you think you can read this better than I, minstrel?" she said sharply.

  He shook his head. "I would not presume so, lady, since I've never seen its like before. But tell me, does it point north permanently, or is there some way to change its bearing?"

  She curled her fingers about the brooch. "Have they no north-seeking needles where you come from?"

  "I've seen none. Of course, I am only a minstrel, and there are many things I do not know. Still, a contrivance like that would be useful to travelers, and I've met many a traveler in my time, and none that carried one."

  At a flick of her thumb, the needle sank back flush with the gold device. She refastened the brooch to her bosom. "So they know lodestones in the south, but not the needle that seeks the Pole Star." Her mouth curved with the faintest hint of contempt. "This is the most ancient of magic, my Alaric—from the morning of the world. Who does not know this, knows nothing. Small wonder you never believed in any magic but your own."

  Alaric would have shrugged, had his pack not been so heavy. "I believe in the evidence of my eyes, lady. And they have seen much fakery among those who call themselves magicians and witches."

  She nodded slightly. "Turning water to wine, I suppose, and plucking small animals from empty bowls. Meaningless tricks to awe the gullible into buying useless potions. Oh yes, I know something of the fools in the south." She turned her face to him. "It would seem they have lost all the important knowledge of the past. The knowledge that we of the north still cherish, of the real power that lies all around us, like a net encompassing the world. And perhaps that is only proper, for that power issues from the north itself, and is strongest where the Pole Star's rule is strongest; and so who should be more worthy of it than the people who call that place their home?" She looked away from him then, back to the icy way that stretched before them. "A true witch spends a lifetime learning to use that power, and believe me, few have the ability, and fewer the patience. Yet the reward for ability and patience is great, my Alaric: the power of life and death, the power that chooses between sickness and health, between the full belly and starvation, between the storm and the calm—that is the real magic the world offers us. That is my magic. You had the merest taste of it, once."