The Ring Оf Fire. The Wolf Bell

SIXTEEN

The light at her back cast her shadow into the cave to meet the heavy darkness. She tried to walk softly, so she could hear. Were the Kubalese waiting in there?

But where were their horses, then? She knew she was being silly and forced herself ahead, clinging to the left-hand wall as the darkness closed around her.

It was very different without Meatha’s steady guidance. The blackness could be a narrow trail, could be a drop of empty space, she had no trust in the fact that she had walked here before. She felt out with each foot before she was willing to take a step. And her fear of something unseen shook her so she could hardly force herself ahead. But the inner cave drew her; she pressed on, the blackness muffling her senses.

Perhaps even the wall she clutched would deceive her, would take a wrong turning so she would be led in a different direction. She tried to remember a break in this wall, but her memory of that other passage was mostly of Meatha’s sureness.

She strained to see in a darkness where no vision was possible, strained to hear where the fall of her own footsteps filled her ears.

And in her sudden blindness, she thought she understood better what Meatha must have felt all her life. Meatha, who knew that something more existed around her than what she could see. I could only guess at what she felt, Zephy thought sadly. I didn’t understand what she sought after, what she yearned so hard for sometimes that she was pale and lonely with it. I could never help her.

The darkness was growing less dense, she could see the walls a little; then the cave was there ahead. She ran headlong into the cave, loving the light, staring up gratefully at that far, small patch of sky overhead.

Then she turned and saw the wagon. Did that mean Anchorstar was here? But there were no horses, no sign of fire . . .

She stood still for a long time, a cold little fear stirring within her. At last she started toward the wagon. She stopped again before the red door and stared up at it, reluctant to climb the steps and push it open; yet knowing that she must. And when she did, there was a heaviness in her and her heart was pounding for no reason.

The wagon was lined with cupboards painted red and decorated with patterns of gold. The wood of the ceiling gleamed, and the bunk . . . how strange, everything so neat, nothing out of place, and yet the bunk’s covers were heaped and tangled as if . . . She stood staring—as if someone were sleeping. “Anchorstar,” she whispered. Yet she knew it was not Anchorstar, for now she could see a thatch of red hair beneath the goatskin robes.

She crept forward, afraid to speak, afraid to touch him. He lay so still as she pulled the robes back. His face was pale as death; but when she touched it, it was hot with fever. His lips were cracked, and there was a long slash across his cheek scabbed over with clotted blood. The red stubble across his cheeks made her think he had lain there for several days. “Thorn! Oh Thorn!” He did not stir. She knelt and picked up the waterskin from the floor. It was quite dry.

She felt panic, did not know what to do. While she tried to think, she searched the wagon for more water. She found none, nor any food, only a lantern. At least there was flint. She lit the wick, then took up the waterskin and hurried back through the tunnel as fast as she could manage without putting out the burning oil in its own sloshing. She could see now that the tunnel was quite safe, broad and flat.

When she drew near to the mouth of the cave she set the lantern down and shielded it with rocks so it made only a faint glimmer. Peering out, going quickly, she filled the waterskin at the dark, evil-looking little stream. It was the same water as lower down of course, it was just the light here in the cleft that made it so dark; yet she disliked taking that water back to Thorn.

When she stood once more beside the bunk, Thorn had turned onto his side so the gash was covered. She felt relieved that he had moved. It was some time before she was able to wake him, and then he was as groggy as if he had been drugged. She held the waterskin to his lips, and he drank thirstily.

“Is there pain?”

“In my leg.” His voice was gray and strange. “Pull the covers back and tend to it.”

She set the lamp in a niche above the bed and drew back the goatskin to reveal the dark bloodied bandage around his left calf. She searched for clean cloth, found a little, then went rummaging into Anchorstar’s cupboards for some salve, for crushed moss of dolba leaf to pound.

But she found only a little dried-up ointment of cherla in the bottom of a crock. She mixed the red paste with water, then began to remove the bandage. The wound smelled bad. When she had the bandage open at last, she went sick with the sight, for the leg was festering. It was a long deep wound running from below his knee down through the calf. There had been a lot of blood, the bandage was thick with it and impossible to remove entirely, and there was dried blood soaked into the straw mattress. She cut the bandage away as best she could, then began to wash the wound with water. Thorn winced with the pain.

“How did it get so festered?”

“I don’t know. The rags maybe—some filth. I took them off a dead Kubalese, it’s his tunic. I took it when we buried him.”

“We? If there were others, why didn’t they help you?”

“I sent them on, Loke and the others. I told them I was all right. It was only a wound, I didn’t think . . .” he stared at her. “Where is Anchorstar? You’re supposed to be with Anchorstar.”

“He—the attack came too soon, right as the fires were lit. I’m afraid something has happened to him.”

“Maybe—maybe he just couldn’t reach you. But the Children . . . Where are the Children?”

‘They’re with Tra. Hoppa. On the mountain. They’re all safe. All who are left. Meatha—Meatha and Clytey are dead.” She swallowed and looked at her hands. “Meatha tried the runestone on a girl, on Clytey Varik. She . . . Clytey had a vision of the attack and started screaming and . . .” she looked at him helplessly. “Oh, Thorn. They took them to the death stone.”

“I see,” he said, and they remembered Anchorstar’s words: It would be difficult to train the older ones—Kearb-Mattus does not want you, you three are a threat to the Kubalese. They stared at each other, the pain of Meatha’s death linking them.

“And Shanner?”

“Shanner is dead.” She swallowed. “I dug his grave, in the burned field.” Tears came then, and she knelt by the bunk, crying against him.

It was not until the wound was cleansed, Zephy fretting over what to do for the festering, that they realized they had been speaking to each other in silence, feeling revulsion at the Cloffi ways and at the Kubalese tyranny, and sensing a commitment, too, that increasingly grew and held them.

“And the stone,” she responded at last, though she had tried to avoid thinking about it. “The stone is gone.” And she knew he felt, with her, the searching in the gutters, her despair.

“The prophecy,” Thorn said, “the prophecy about the stone—found by the light of one candle, carried in a searching, and lost in terror . . .”

“It was lost in terror. That has all happened. And then,” she said, remembering Anchorstar’s words, “Found in wonder, given twice, and accompanying a quest and a conquering . . .”

“Found in wonder,” he said with an effort. His pallor had not diminished. “And who will find it? Given twice?” His eyes searched hers.

“And accompanying a quest and a conquering—”

Would they see the whole prophecy come to pass?

“I brought food,” she said at last. “Let me help you sit up.” She laid out the mawzee cakes for him. “But you can’t walk. I’ll have to soak your leg, it won’t be better until I do.”

“Soak it with what?”

“Birdmoss, maybe.”

“There’s birdmoss in the river near the village.”

“There are Kubalese on the mountain, searching for something—for your people, do you think? For you?”

“I don’t know.” He turned to look through the wagon’s little window. “We’ll wait until darkness. I can’t run, we’d be sitting targets. See what you can find in those cupboards. Weapons, rope . . .”

She gathered together everything that would be of use to them, and when darkness came, they made a pack with the blankets and slipped out. She had found a small hoard of mountain meat, and some tammi leaves to make tea.

“What if Anchorstar comes back? What if he needs this bit of food?”

“I hope he has gone on along the mountain or is waiting for us. I don’t think he would come back here very soon, with the Kubalese searching.”

If he is alive, they both thought. If they haven’t killed him.

Getting down the steps of the wagon was not easy, and when they had gone only a little way across the grass, she began to wonder if they could manage. Thorn’s weight against her was considerable, and his jerking pace jolted them both. His shallow breathing, from the fever, made her heart lurch with pity, and she could feel his effort and exhaustion increasing even before they entered the dark cave.

It seemed an eternity, that trip to the mouth of the cave. There they rested for a long time, Thorn exhausted and Zephy aching from her effort. But night was coming down; the darkness would protect them. They started at last along the river, and where it foamed in a pool above Dunoon she found birdmoss and knelt to wrap his leg.

“It stings.”

“It’s supposed to. Should we go through the village?”

“Up behind it at the edge of the rocks where there’s some cover, where it’s hard going for horses.”

It was hard going for them, too, and longer this way, the dark climb slow and difficult. She wished she had stolen the Kubalese horses. “Be careful, can’t you!” Thorn growled. “You jammed my leg against a boulder.”

“I’m trying, Thorn. You’re heavy as a dead donkey.”

She could feel him try to take more of his own weight then, and she was sorry she had said anything. At last, high above the plateau, they rested among the sheltering rocks. “Why would a wound make me so weak and give me such a fever? Even if it festers, it—”

“It’s filled with poison. That’s why it festers. The moss will draw it out.” She sounded more certain than she felt. His weakness made her afraid. She had kept seeing Thorn in her mind standing tall on the mountain, his face ruddy with health, his green eyes challenging her. Now his eyes were so pale, and he seemed to have little challenge left in him. Their blind hopping progress must make the pain a hundred times worse. If only they could have a light. But they could not have brought the lantern, it would have been like a fire on the mountain for the Kubalese to see.

At last the moons began to rise, lifting up over the sea beyond Carriol and lighting the stones ahead of them, casting a silver wash across the grassy clearings and up the peaks and cliffs on their left. Now with the moonlight they could go faster. They rested less often, surer in their progress and not blundering into boulders. They felt much easier when they were well away from Dunoon, pausing once beside a trickle of water to fill Thorn’s waterskin and sit on a boulder, staring down at the moon-touched land below them. A few lights still burned in Burgdeeth. Was one of them the Inn? Zephy had a terrible longing for Mama, was gripped by emptiness when she thought of her, alone at the mercy of the Kubalese; without help, if she should need it. Zephy turned away from Thorn, biting back tears.

“She wanted to stay,” Thorn said softly. “She’s a grown woman, Zephy. It was what she chose to do.”

She stared at him. He had seen it in her mind as if it were his own thought. She shook her head and tried to smile.

He put his arm around her, and they sat silently, the comfort of his concern washing over her. His strength, in spite of his illness, wrapped around her so she was soothed by it.

The moonlight made the cleared fields below look pale as ice, the land all awash with patterned silver like the dreams she had once cherished, as if Chealish castles lay there, and wishing springs and the towers of sacred cities.

“As it should be,” Thorn said.

“As Carriol is,” she whispered, her heart lifting.

He looked at her with surprise. “But Carriol’s not like that, not magic, Zephy. It’s only a country, it has bad as well as good. Don’t think to find it perfect.”

“I only thought—the way I always imagined it . . .” It had been magic, the way she’d thought of it. How foolish, she’d never realized. “Still . . .”

“Yes. Still it is free. It is a place to grow in, to become what you were meant to be, maybe.”

“Yes. What we were meant to be.” Then, “Where would Kearb-Mattus have taken the other Children? To Kubal, do you think? But that means,” she said slowly, “that we must go there too.”

“Yes. We must go into Kubal.”

It was nearly midnight when they came at last to the little clearing with the rocks across its entrance. Zephy strained to push them back. “No, wait, I can climb them,” Thorn said, pulling her away. He slid up, surprisingly agile on his hands and one knee, and she handed him the pack.

In the shallow cave three figures sat up in the darkness; the baby stirred and whimpered. Elodia took Zephy’s hand and Toca clutched at her tunic. But Tra. Hoppa looked only at Thorn. She put her hands on his shoulders and turned him so the moonlight touched his face. Then she led him to her goatskin robes and helped him to lie down. She prepared a drought for him, soaked the wrappings on the moss, then brought him bread and charp fruit. Zephy was hungry too, and bone tired, but the old woman’s concern was all for Thorn.

A thin rain had started, making Zephy shiver, and she was close to tears with fatigue. Elodia pulled her in under her own covers as if she were the older of the two; but even warmed by Elodia’s closeness, it was a long time before Zephy was able to sleep.

And when at last she slept she dreamed and woke in a cold sweat, but unable to remember; then she slept again, and when she woke the sun was shining into the green clearing and glinting off the black stone cliffs. And high up the cliff Elodia was clinging to the stone, picking morliespongs. Zephy lay half dreaming still and saw that Thorn still slept. She brought herself more fully awake and sat up to look at him. His color was better, and he seemed to breathe more easily. She smiled and lay back and was about to sleep again when she smelled their breakfast cooking.

She rose and found Tra. Hoppa laying breakfast on a stone in the center of the clearing. The fried morliespongs smelled wonderful, and there was mawzee mush and a little of the mountain meat. The eager donkeys had to be tied to a boulder to keep them out of the food. Dess, who had pushed in greedily, sulked now with her tail turned to them in fury.

The baby had been bathed and properly fed, his napkin washed and laid across a rock to dry while he sported a piece of Tra. Hoppa’s petticoat; he seemed much happier; certainly he smelled better. Toca held him solemnly, his blond head bent over the child, then looked up at last with a lonely, hopeless expression on his face. “He wants his mother,” the little boy said sadly. “It’s like . . . it’s an ache in him you can feel.”

Zephy put her arm around Toca. “And she must want him too. She must ache for him terribly.” She paused, studying the child. “But he is like you, Toca. He’s like all of us. We’re different. We would have been killed had we stayed, or made slave.”

“Children of Ynell,” Toca said solemnly, his six-year-old face serious and pale. She could see the fear in him; she thought the sin of his difference must have frightened him all his short life.