Pellinor: The Singing Part 18

"Perhaps Dernhil knew there was no time. He had foresight . . ." Cadvan sighed and looked away. "But he was ever one who looked clearly into his own heart. That is the beauty of his poems. Would that all of us were so lucid." He fell silent, following his own thoughts.

"But I've learned how to hate, too," said Maerad. "I thought I hated Gilman, back when I was little, but I only despised him. I hate Enkir. I hate the Nameless One. I hate them for everything they've destroyed. For destroying my life, and Hem's life." She looked again at her maimed hand. "I just don't know where it stops. When you think about it, are the Light and the Dark so different? Why is it right to hate sometimes and not at other times? Why is it right to destroy this creature, and not that one?"

"It is never right. Sometimes, Maerad, there is no right thing..."

"Well, I do not like the world that makes it so." Maerad clenched her hands under her cloak. "And I will never like it." She took a deep breath. "You know what Ardina meant, Cadvan, as well as I do. She was saying that I have to embrace that hatred and that darkness and thata"murderousnessa" inside me, if I'm to understand myself, if I want to know how to use those powers. The strange thing is, I thought I had embraced them. But when I think about it..."

Cadvan listened alertly, his eyes dark, as if he knew what Maerad was about to say and wanted to stop her saying it.

"When I think about it, I know I've been too afraid of that hatred to really feel it. You know, after I destroyed those Hulls, the first time, I was so frightened of what I had done. But underneath that, I was so excited, I felta"well, it was something like a kind ofa"even like happiness, exhilaration, something like that. I think that feeling frightened me more than what I had done."

"What are you saying, Maerad?" said Cadvan tensely.

"Cadvan, you know what I'm saying." Maerad looked at him with despair. "Please, please, don't pretend that you don't know what I'm saying. You, of all people ..."

"I think you're saying that you want to open the darkness within you."

"Yes." Maerad held up her hand to stop Cadvan's objections. "I know what you're going to say, Cadvan. I know it. I know all the arguments."

"Maerad, that seems to me a grievous misunderstandinga" you can't mean it." Cadvan was very pale. "Yes, I of all people know that exhilaration you speak of. And I of all people also know its cost. It destroyed my youth, Maerad, and killed one I loved more than life itself. And I fear that if you turn this way, you become even as the Nameless One himself. Perhaps worse. No, Maerad, I do not permit this."

"It's not a question of whether you permit me or not," said Maerad stiffly.

"Then I beg you, Maerad. I beg you by the long friends.h.i.+p between us. Do not go that way. If you choose this path, I can only foresee doom. For all of us, not only for yourself."

"But if I can use these powers properly, if I can enter my full strength, I might be able to find Hem," said Maerad. "And you're right, Cadvan, we don't have much chance of finding him otherwise. Maybe no chance at all."

Cadvan said nothing for a long time. He stood up and walked out into the night, and Maerad could hear him moving around in the darkness, and then talking quietly to the horses. Maerad sensed the turbulence in his mind, and it grieved her; at the same time, she felt she had no choice but to do as Ardina had suggested, and she knew that she would attempt to wake her full powers whether Cadvan approved or not. But she would greatly prefer it if she had his support. The memory of her idle experiment the night before was still fresh in her mind; she didn't want any repeat of that torment.

And most of all, despite the growing determination within hera"which amounted to a certainty that she had no choice, that she had to try or fail utterly in her questa"she was desperately afraid. She didn't want to make the attempt alone. She needed Cadvan.

At last Cadvan came back to the circle of firelight, and sat cross-legged next to Maerad. "I understand that you feel you must do this thing," he said. "And I cannot say that I think it is right. But I also know that I can't stop you, and that you will do it anyway, whatever I say. So." He stared at the ground, his face dark and troubled, and Maerad held her breath. "My one request is that you wait a day. Don't attempt whatever it is you think you should do until you've slept on it. I will not abandon you, Maerad; it's too late for me to turn away. And I will do my best to help you, even though you plan to do what I think you should not, even though I fear the ruin of all our enterprise in this venture. I will do this, out of the love that I bear you. For no other reason. May I be forgiven under the justice of the Light."

Maerad was overwhelmed with relief. She hadn't understood until that moment how much she had feared that Cadvan would abandon her. Unable to speak, she reached out and took Cadvan's hand. He clasped her small white hand in both of his and looked down at it, earnestly examining the broken, dirty nails, the calluses, the small white scars that marked her skin.

"I swear, Maerad, that I have never said anything in my life that was harder to say." He looked up and smiled at her, a broken smile that made Maerad's heart contract with pain.

"Everything is difficult," she whispered. "Maybe that's something else that I've learned."

After breaking their fast the following day, Maerad and Cadvan discussed whether to move on or to stay where they were. Maerad thought it figured little where they were: for the past couple of days they had been moving east along the northern edge of the floods, without attempting to venture southward over the lands where the waters had subsided.

The floods had left a layer of silt over everything, along with a litter of broken branches tangled with dead gra.s.ses, and embedded in the mud there were the bloated bodies of animals. Over everything hung the sweet, disgusting stench of rotting flesh: for all its chilliness, Maerad was glad for the freshening wind from the eastern mountains, which stopped the odor of decay from becoming overwhelming. It also lifted the mist that had obscured their view for the past few days, and they could see far over the lowlands. Before them stretched a melancholy swamp, dotted with muddy pools that were rapidly turning stagnant. The most st.u.r.dy trees had survived, but many had been snapped off at the trunk by the violence of the waters, and the gra.s.ses that weren't covered in silt were flattened and yellowed by the water. For all her impatience, Maerad sympathized with the horses' refusal to venture into the wreckage of the flood. Cadvan said that if the weather continued clear, especially with the drying wind, it would be safe to move south within a couple of days. Darsor kept studiously silent on the subject.

They decided, in the end, to find a place that offered more shelter than the overhanging rock that had been their roof the night before. Cadvan also wanted to find a site that was defensible and that gave them a view of the surrounding area, in case Maerad's exercise of power attracted unwelcome notice. In this part of Annar there was no chance of finding a Bardhome, but they thought that perhaps they might discover, among the strange rock formations of the Hollow Lands, something like the rocky shelter that they had discovered the day before last.

It was some time before they discovered what they were looking for. On top of a low hill, a tumulus of huge stones formed a natural cave big enough to house the two Bards, and to the side there was even a kind of porch where the horses could be out of the wind. They stopped here, although it was only just after midday, and set up camp, gathering a high pile of the sagebrush that grew thickly around this area to use as fuel. It was dry and easy to light, and it made a fragrant smoke; but it burned quickly. The sky was still overcast, but the clouds were high and held no smell of rain. The wind had risen during the morning, and seemed to have grown colder; it was a relief to be out of its punis.h.i.+ng chill. As the homely light of their fire flickered over the gray stone walls, Maerad felt almost cheerful.

"So what do you plan to do?" said Cadvan, after they had finished eating their noonday meal.

Maerad glanced at him in surprise; it was unlike Cadvan to be so forthright. "I don't know," she said. "I've been wondering all morning. It's not like anything I've tried to do before, because, in a way, I'm not trying to do anything. I mean, when I've done things before, either it just happened because I was frightened or angry, or because I needed to make something happen. Like when I first turned into a wolf, it was because Ardina told me to do it, and I just thought of what I wanted to happen and went from there; and fighting the Landrost was kind of the same, only more difficult, and all I thought about was how to stop him killing my friends. But this isn't like that. I want to be able to use all my powers, and I know that I have to finda"to find the whole of mea"but how do you do that? I mean, it's no good just wis.h.i.+ng..."

She paused, and then directed a sharp glance at Cadvan. "In a way, I don't know why the idea upsets you so much," she said. "Doesn't the Balance talk about the Dark and Light within you? Haven't you said often that you cannot perceive the Light without the Darkness? And surely that's what I want to do?"

Cadvan looked taken aback. "Yes, you're right," he said. "And there is a Balance to be found. But there is a darkness in you, Maerad, that makes me wary; it is not of a kind that I have felt before. I have tried to speak of it to you." A shadow pa.s.sed over his face as he recalled their worst quarrel, a breach that had almost ended in both their deaths. "I fear that in that darkness, there is no Balance. Or, perhaps, that there is not any kind of Balance as Bards understand it."

"Perhaps the Knowing of the Bards doesn't cover everything there is to know," said Maerad.

"Barding does not pretend to hold all knowledge," said Cadvan, his voice hard. Maerad looked away. "All the same, do not think to hold the Elementals as all-wise, Maerad, merely because they have Knowing that we do not."

Maerad thought of the cold, arrogant face of Enkir. "Some Bards do believe that their Knowing is above any other kind," she said.

"Aye," said Cadvan, catching her thought. "But those Bards do not observe the Balance, Maerad. Their minds are all too literal, and brook no contradiction. But we could argue of the Balance all day, and still get no closer to the truth. I return to my earlier question: what do you plan to do?"

Maerad drew her cloak around her and leaned closer to the fire, feeling its healing warmth on her wind-chapped cheeks. "I will try to see if I am bigger," she said. "I was thinkinga"when I change into wolfskin, I go inside, deeper and deeper and deeper, until I have no Name at all. And when I fought with the Landrost, I went out, further and further and further, until I was so far away I no longer knew who I was, or even what I was."

She sat back on her heels and brushed her hair out of her eyes.

"So I thought, what if I do neither of these things, but try to stay where I am, and see if I can become more? I mean, perhaps when I go in or out, I am like a spear, a narrow thing, so I can pierce through all those layers of being. But perhaps I need to bea"well, something like a lake. Something broad as well as deep and high." She looked up, frowning with concentration, and when she met Cadvan's intent gaze, her brow cleared and she suddenly laughed. "I suppose I've just talked a mountain of nonsense!"

Cadvan did not smile. "It might not be the most common of sense," he said. "But I do not think you speak nonsense, Maerad of Pellinor."

Cadvan insisted that Maerad be prepared for her experiment, although he said that she would probably sense best what she should do. He had decided to cast a glimveil over their camp, in case the release of magery attracted unwelcome attention; although he thought privately that if Maerad did succeed in unlocking her full powers, no charm he could make could possibly contain or conceal them.

Maerad pondered for a short time, and then washed her face and hands in rainwater collected in a pool on the rocks nearby. As she did, she remembered vividly the preparation she had made for her meeting with Inka-Reb, the powerful Dhillarearen in the far north to whom she had journeyed with her cousin Dharin in search of the Treesong. She had not thought about Inka-Reb much since; her life had been full of so many things, and that meeting had been strange and disturbing. She saw his bulky, huge figure clearly in her mind's eye, naked, smeared with ash and fat, squatting by the fire in his cave, and she remembered the wolves who surrounded hima" the same wolves who had later accepted her as one of their own. Inka-Reb had an inner power that awed her. Perhaps if anyone could teach her how to come fully into her Gift, he could; but even if she struggled all the way north again, she guessed that he would probably refuse. In this matter, she was on her own. She thought that perhaps Inka-Reb might not disapprove of what she was trying to do. He was, after all, contemptuous of both the Dark and the Light.

When she returned from was.h.i.+ng herself, she suggested that she and Cadvan bring out their lyres, which lay, untouched since Innail, in their packs. He looked at her in surprise, but brought out his lyre without further comment. Maerad held hers in the crook of her arm, gazing thoughtfully at the inscrutable runes that decorated its plain wood. She knew what they were now; they were the runes of the Treesong, its power captured and written down by the great Afinil Bard Nelsor, in the days of the Dhyllin. But she still didn't know how to make them sing, how to release them back to the Elidhu.

"I thought," said Maerad, clearing her throat, "I thought that we could sing "The Song of Making.'"

Cadvan looked pleased, but only said, "Your wish is my command."

Maerad felt unaccountably nervous, as if she were performing in front of a hall of critical Bards, instead of in the empty wilderness. She held her lyre in her hands, and let the magery rise within her until she was surrounded by a nimbus of light, and her left hand was whole again. She nodded to Cadvan, and struck the opening chords.

They sang in close harmony, Cadvan's baritone and Maerad's pure, husky voice filling their shelter, and Maerad felt all her sorrow and anxieties lift and dissolve in the sheer beauty of the music.

"First was dark, and the darkness Was all ma.s.s and all dimension, although without touch And the darkness was all colors and all forms, although without sight And the darkness was all music and all sound, although without hearing And it was all perfumes, and all tastes, sour and bitter and sweet But it knew not itself.

And the darkness thought, and it thought without mind And the thought became mind and the thought quickened And the thought was Light, was the Light in darkness, And where Light fell, there was its shadow, And the shadow moved and a dark eye opened ..."

It was the first song Maerad had chosen to sing in her daylong preparation to meet Inka-Reb. She had been taught this song when she was a child, and had heard it many times in the past year; and every time she heard it, it showed her new, more complex meanings. As she sang the opening stanzas, she realized how deeply it chimed with her recent thoughts. I need, she thought, my own dark eye to open ...

As the final chords died on the air, she bowed her head and let the light of magery die out of her, and both she and Cadvan were silent for a long time. Finally Maerad lifted her head and looked Cadvan straight in the eye.

"I will begin now," she said.

Cadvan nodded. He did not seem in the least afraid, but he looked very sad, as if he were bidding Maerad farewell as she left on a long journey.

Maerad took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.

She entered the darkness that was her inner self, the place from which she began all her magery. The desire to move on was strong within her; from this place, she would either plunge down through her deeper selves or quest outward with the heightened perceptions that the darkness generated. With an effort of will she remained just where she was, suspended on the threshold of possibility, waiting to see if anything might happen.

Nothing happened for what seemed like a long time. Maerad found it hard to concentrate; in this place, she felt blurred, as if she were only half present. She tried to keep focused and alert, to feel the mysterious contours of this inner world, attempting to sense any thickening of shadow around her; but nothing seemed to happen. She began to think that she had been mistaken, that perhaps this was not the correct place to begin, when she noticed that there seemed to be a faint illumination, as subtle as starlight, growing around her, as if her inner eyes were adjusting.

After a while she was sure that her awareness had grown inside the s.p.a.ce, but it was happening so gradually that she almost hadn't noticed. Again she felt the desire to move on (was it onwards? she wondered briefly to herself: in this place there was no sense of dimension, no sense of time). But again she resisted the urge, and stayed where she was, concentrating on the thought of making herself bigger. Bigger? said the voice in her head again; all you are trying to fill up is yourself, this makes no sense ... As soon as her doubts voiced themselves, she lost her focus, and the seeming illumination vanished. She almost withdrew in frustration; while it wasn't exactly unpleasant to be in this strange limbo, it wasn't pleasant either. But a stubbornness kicked inside her, a refusal to give up at the first hurdle. She tried again, this time without letting her doubt rise to the surface of her mind.

Slowly she regained her focus, holding herself in a strangely agonizing pose of suspension. This time the dim illuminationa"if that was what it wasa"arrived a little more swiftly. She still couldn't sense anything about this inner s.p.a.ce; it's strange formlessness simply existed around her (or within her) without revealing any kind of contour. She wondered whether she should exercise some kind of will rather than the pa.s.sivity she was having such difficulty maintaining, or whether to do so might obliterate what little she could already sense. At first she decided against it, but when nothing further happened, she began to feel impatient. She didn't want to go anywhere; but she did want to know more about where she was. She thought of her earlier idea, that she wanted to be like a lake, and imagined herself as a great body of water, as formless as this faintly glimmering darkness, pus.h.i.+ng outward in all directions, filling it up.

At first it seemed to work; or at least, the lumination began to coalesce into tiny, blurred points of light. The dim lights looked like stars seen through a mist. She was at first astonished: surely it was, not just like starlight, but starlight itself? Was she full of secret constellations? And then another sense began to rise within her, a fluidly brilliant perception unlike any of her normal six senses, although this too seemed blurred, like a song that she knew intimately, but that evaded her recognition because it ran beneath her hearing. Or perhaps it was like a picture that she couldn't quite see, a half-remembered image from her childhood, perhaps . . . only it was really like none of these things, but something else entirely that she had no words for. But neither of these thingsa"the stars, if they were stars, or this other, new perceptiona"became any clearer, although now she strained to perceive them.

The feeling of suspension, of being neither here nor there nor even in between, of being unnaturally still rather than naturally in motion, was beginning to be unbearable, a kind of suffocation of her mind. It grew until she thought she couldn't stand it, that she would have to move outward or inward, anywhere but where she was, and she felt a helpless anger welling up through her. It was then that she remembered her reason for being there. Up until now, in the sheer strangeness of this limi-nal no-s.p.a.ce, she had forgotten it, as completely as the most important details of a dream slip from the waking mind.

Normally Maerad would have pressed this anger down, and attempted to keep her thoughts cool and rational. Anger only possessed her in extreme situations where it was powerful enough to outstrip her conscious control. This time, with an effort of will, she allowed it to grow. At first she disliked the feeling almost as much as the suffocation that had prompted it; she felt a quiver of fear as its red tide rose within her. Like the flood, it brought with it a strange detritus; random fragments of memory swirled through her, things she hadn't thought about for years. Old slights unanswered, injuries unrevenged, injustices suffereda"all trivial events that she had at the time set aside, too proud to respond toa"returned with their original force, their humiliating stings undiminished. On their heels came memories that were not so trivial: her mother, broken and defeated, dying in the squalid slaves' dormitory in Gilman's Cot; her father's murder during the sack of Pellinor; the point of Enkir's dagger at her childish throat as he blackmailed her mother into revealing where Hem was taken to be hidden. All her lost, blasted childhood. And all the deaths that had followed her: Dernhil, Dharin ...

None of these things was fair, none of them was just, none was her fault. Each memory possessed her, filling her with bitter despair, and then a terrible hatred tore through her like raw flame. She cared about nothing except her own pain, her loss, her maimed life ... for a moment she wanted to howl, and she almost sank out of the protean darkness into her wolfskin; but some remnant of her purpose remained, and she stopped herself, pulsing with an extreme, amorphous hatred. And within her, as if her hatred and anger had undammed a violent river, there rushed a brilliant, luminous sense of power, as deadly and implacable as a flood, as a wolf at the kill.

A thrill went through her, and she forgot her hatred; now she basked in the pure pleasure of power. She had felt something like this when she had first become a wolf, delighting in her physical strength; it had felt something like this when she had killed the Kulag, although she had dreaded that joy. But now she saw clearly the dark coils woven into the bright currents that coursed through her being. She could do anything. She could kill; she could destroy; she could reach out her hand and shrivel the root of all living things; or lean forward to kiss the dead into life. And the thought did not shock her.

She looked around her and saw the stars, bright and huge as she had never seen them, aligned in patterns that were made legible by the other sense that had so puzzled her earlier. It was a sense that could trace fields and vortices of energy; she felt how the stars moved each in its...o...b..t, how the earth rolled beneath her, how the tides undulated to the moon; she heard the slow pulse of rock, the quick heartbeat of birds. She was suddenly aware of Cadvan's stubborn, intent presence, his thoughts bent solely on her, and she knew that he had been watching her for hours, and that the sun had long set. It was now deep night, under a clear and moonless sky thick with an infinity of stars.

She widened her field of perception and her being filled with awareness. She heard voices echoing, many voices, cries and whispers and howls, and she could sense dim presences, outlined with a vagrant luminosity. She knew without thinking that these were the dead in the Hollow Lands, the faint murmur of their voices arcing across uncounted years, the warmth of their hands vibrating still in the stones they had raised, in the tombs they had dug beneath the stones. She cast wider still, curious and exhilarated by this new sense, and felt the dark presence of Hulls, not far away, not close, and she knew that their heads were raised, questing, and their nostrils flared as they caught the scent of the power that briefly touched their minds. For the first time she did not fear them; contempt curled in the depths of her being. They were nothing, no more than wisps of smoke on the wind.

She hunted further still, learning as she went, refining and directing this new sense. She knew by the alignment of her inner stars that she was questing south, over the drenched lowlands. She heard the voices of those who had drowned, the grief of the homeless, the panicked lowing of cattle, the sharp fear of goats and sheep, the feathered terror of birds, the slow agony of trees. She paused, dizzied and confused by the chaotic babble of presences. She was no longer certain what the present meant; the voices came from the present, but she could hear also into the recent past, and behind that, fainter voices rose through the years, through decades and centuries, stretching back to a time that she could barely comprehend.

In all this cacophony, she sought one particular light, one particular smell, one particular voice, one particular time: now. A word formed in her mind, a word of the Speech, and it hung before her like silver fire, one utterly clear thing in this world of s.h.i.+fting shadows and light, and all her desire flowed into it, and it intensified to an unbearable brilliance. Riik. Crow. The silver flame poured through her and became a voice, and she sought through the lowlands, through all the voices, all the dead, all the living, and found the one person whose Truename it was, the one person who would hear his Name coursing through his blood like fiery bells, like the voice of starlight. Riik, she said, Riik, my brother. Come to me.

Leagues away, in a shepherd's hut on a dark hill, in the nameless depths of sleep, Hem started awake and scrambled to his feet, looking around him with wild eyes. "Maerad!" he said, and stumbled out of the hut's low door. "Maerad?" And then his earth sense rose inside him, a hunger that pulled him with a force so powerful that he almost doubled over with the pain of it.

Come to me, said Maerad.

Hem realized, with a disappointment that hit him almost as painfully as his earth sense, that Maerad was not there. But the force of her summoning had been so strong that he could almost see the way toward her, like a s.h.i.+mmering pathway of silver through the darkness. It was as if Maerad were the moon rising over a calm sea, and the path toward her was a road of white ripples that swept northward from Hem's feet.

I will come to you, he cried, but the summoning had released him, and he didn't know if she heard his answer. Maerad, I'm coming.

Chapter XIV.

NEWS OF HULLS.

HEM sat down on the dew-damp gra.s.s, weak with the shock of what had just happened, and stared northward over the shadowy hills that humped darkly under the star-strewn sky, and which now seemed emptier than ever.

Maerad. He had been so sure that she was just outside the hut, calling him; he could have sworn that he could smell her, a faint, sweet musk on the night air. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and ordered his distracted thoughts. The blazing pathway he had seen had now faded, but he felt its pull vividly; he knew, at last, exactly where to go. His first impulse was to go back into the hut and wake Saliman and leave at once, but he thought again and decided to wait until morning.

He looked up at the stars, seeking Ilion, the dawn star: it was already low on the western horizon. It would not be long before the sky began to pale toward morning. He s.h.i.+vered. There wasn't much point in going back to sleep. He returned to the hut and began to blow on the embers of the damped-down fire, coaxing a small flame onto dry wood with shaking hands. Irc stirred sleepily on his perch on Hem's pack and gave a small protesting caw at being woken, and then instantly fell asleep again.

Hem tended the fire until his hands stopped trembling. It was certainly Maerad who had called him, but he had never felt such a powerful summoning. And she had called him by his Truename. Riik. Crow. He glanced across at Irc, and almost laughed aloud. Of course that was his Name; that was what everyone called him, after all. Lios Hlaf, the White Crow, had been his nickname in Turbansk. But how did Maerad know? He hadn't been instated as a Bard yet; he didn't have a Truename. Maybe, somehow, Maerad had instated him? Or maybe he could have a Bardic Truename without being properly instated, after all? He would have to ask Saliman.

Saliman was sleeping against the far wall of the hut, wrapped in his cloak and blanket. Hem could hear his easy breathing underneath the crackle of the fire. Saliman was clear of the White Sickness, but Hem was shocked by how weakened he was. And he had healed him in the early stages of the illness; Hem knew now that had he been any more sick, their chances would have been slim indeed. When he looked back at the risk he had run, Hem went cold. Saliman was correct; he had been mad to try it. And even so, it had taken everything he had, and more that he didn't know he had.

After that last terrible moment when he had called Saliman's Name and collapsed over his body, he had lain in a swoon until late the following day. He had opened his eyes to the soft red light of the sinking sun, which shone straight into the doorway of the hut. At first, he hadn't known where he was. He was overwhelmingly thirsty, and his body ached from the top of his head to the tips of his toes: it was as if he been beaten all over, he groaned, clutching his head, and sat up.

Saliman was sitting next to him, stirring a stew that smelled very good. When he heard Hem move, he turned around. "I am sorry for the smoke in here," he said. "But I do not have the energy to light a new fire outside the door. Eating and warmth seem more important at the moment."

Hem stared at Saliman as memory trickled back. "You're alive," he said. His voice croaked with dryness, and Saliman wordlessly pa.s.sed him a water bottle. Hem took a long drink, and wiped his lips. Never had plain water tasted so sweet.

"Aye," said Saliman. "I have pinched all my arms and legs, and even my nose, and I am not dreaming. Beyond hope, I am still alive. A little the worse for wear, but I am not complaining. I can't but feel glad that you so wickedly disobeyed me. I owe you my life."

"I thought you were going to die," said Hem. He wanted to shout, to sing, to rush around the hills dancing for joy, but he seemed unable to do anything at all except say obvious, foolish things. He was so tired, he could barely hold himself upright.

"Don't speak," said Saliman. "There is no need. And this stew will be ready soon."

The stew, too, tasted excellent. Even the fuggy, smoky air in that tiny hut seemed as fragrant as a rose garden in the palaces of Turbansk.

"I suppose that everything tastes so good because I thought I wasn't going to taste anything ever again," said Hem, scooping up the last spoonfuls of stew from his plate. Saliman smiled, but said nothing.

Irc had come in, with unerring timing, just as Saliman was dis.h.i.+ng out their meal, and was crooning contentedly in Hem's lap. Hem put down his plate and tickled Irc's neck. The crow had been unusually quiet; he sensed how close he had come to losing his friends, although Hem hadn't told him how desperate their situation was. And he had been more frightened of the floods than he cared to admit. The water had risen until the ridges where they had taken refuge had become a series of islands, and Irc said some of the islands were crowded with damp, miserable animals.

I saw chickens and foxes together in the mud, he told Hem, wiping his beak on Hem's trousers. And the chickens were not running, and the foxes were not chasing them. Neither wanted to speak to me. It was very strange.

They were frightened, Hem said.

Well, I suppose it won't be long before everyone is hunting again.

Irc demanded a scratch and then perched on Hem's pack and went to sleep. Hem and Saliman chatted for a short time about trivial things, like Irc's observations, or the sorry state of Hem's boots; neither of them felt able to speak about anything serious, such as how close they had both been to death, or what they should do next. Hem was trying to conceal his concern at how much thinner Saliman had become in the last couple of days: already lean from hard traveling, he was almost skeletal, and his face was haggard. He scarcely looked less drawn now, despite the fact that both of them had spent much of their time sleeping, only waking for meals.

And now that he had been summoned, Hem knew they had to move on. He looked at Saliman's sleeping form and wondered how he would fare. He couldn't leave without him; but the urgency of Maerad's call burned inside his body like a blazing hunger.

For the moment Hem put aside these worries. He realized that the exhaustion that had weighed him down the past couple of days had vanished. He felt no tiredness at all; as his shock dissipated, a rare joy began to sing through his veins. Ever since they had left Til Amon, he had been pursued by a nagging doubt: perhaps his conviction that he ought to find Maerad was mistaken; perhaps he was misled by his hope and love, as he had been when he had so desperately sought his friend Zelika through the cursed realm of Den Raven. Now he knew that Maerad was alive, that she sought him just as he sought her, and the knowledge filled him with relief. At last he knew what to do.

As the sky lightened, Irc woke up and stepped over to Hem, asking for food. Hem gave him some sc.r.a.ps left over from the night before, and Irc nibbled his hand in thanks, gulped the food down, and then flew off. Hem walked outside and watched Irc soaring into the air. The sky was cloudless, letting down a clear, pale sunlight, and there was a brisk, cold wind. A good day for walking.

Idly watching Irc, Hem wondered what the crow did on his private missions. Sometimes he would be gone for most of the day, impelled most probably by his insatiable curiosity, but he always returned for meals and often just for a chat. He was a fully adult bird now, and on the ground was large and almost clumsy, a quality belied by his aerial grace. His feathers had lost most of the dye that Hem had used to darken him in Nal-Ak-Burat, in preparation for their mission in Den Raven, and were now almost a glossy white. Hem thought sometimes that perhaps Irc might want to leave his strange, unbirdlike life, and become an ordinary crow, although with his white feathers he would always be ostracized by his fellows. He never asked him, and Irc followed Hem without question, although they were now very far away from where he had hatched, in the warm lands of the south.

Wrapping his cloak close around him against the sharp early wind, Hem walked to the top of the ridge and looked northward over the country they would have to travel. Before him there stretched several long ridges like those they had climbed to find the hut, each lower than the former, like a series of waves sinking down to the plains. They had taken refuge on the only high ground in the area.

The rocky spines of the ridges had escaped the water, but the valleys between them and the plains beyond were a bleak sight, covered with rubbish and silt. If the ground was swampy, it would be a hard trek to the higher ground he saw rising through the haze far in the distance. Hem studied the terrain for a time, then climbed back over the top of the ridge and across to the next southern ridge to look at what had happened to Hiert. The ground he had covered with such painful labor, pus.h.i.+ng the wheelbarrow against the rain, now took him little time to cross.

He surveyed Hiert from the top of the ridge. Before him the flood line was clear; above it, the turf was green, while beneath it, flattened, yellow gra.s.s scattered with rubbish ran down to the houses, which looked forlorn and deserted in the morning light. Most had withstood the flooding, but Hem could see that some buildings had crumbled under the force of the water. The river was now flowing between its banks, still brown and swollen, and the sun shone blindingly on the puddles and pools that it had left behind. Stray animalsa"chickens, pigs, goats, a few cattlea"were wandering the deserted roads, looking for food. Hem could see how deep the flooding had been by the watermarks on the trees; in places it had been almost three spans deep, high enough to flood most of the buildings of Hiert to their roofs.

He could smell the sweet stench of decay rising from the wrack of the village, and wrinkled his nose. Somewhere in Hiert was the body of the nameless man who had given Saliman the White Sickness. Hem thought of him with pity; he doubted that he would ever know who he was, but now he knew a little of the torment that poor man had undergone. He understood why the village had been empty, why everyone had fled before that illness; he could feel the terror of it in his body even now, and he hoped fervently he would never encounter it again.

He sighed, and was about to turn on his heel and make the trek back to their hut, when something caught his eye. A cloaked horseman, leading another horse on a rein, was trotting slowly down the West Road, into Hiert. Hem's skin p.r.i.c.kled with dread. Perhaps it was someone pa.s.sing through, or a townsperson of Hiert who had survived the floods by fleeing to higher land, as he and Saliman had, and was now returning to find out what was left of his home. Or maybe it was the Hull that Saliman had thought might be tracking them through Annar.