“Home would take too long. Eled would never make it,” said Rothir decisively. “I vote for Farwithiel.”
“Farwithiel,” said Maeneb, nodding.
“You think the Farwth will allow it?” Tiburé asked her.
“I don’t know. But it’s worth a try.”
“I vote for Herval,” said Arguril.
“Parthenal?”
The tall man was silent. “There is no good answer,” he replied at last. “But if the Farwth will permit it, Farwithiel is the safest place for Eled.”
“It’s not where we need to be,” said Arguril impatiently.
Tiburé cut in. “We have voted for Farwithiel. We shall set out at first light tomorrow. But the journey there does not need all of us.”
“In that case,” said Arguril, “I offer to go back home as messenger.”
“I will bear that in mind. However, to begin with, we shall all travel together. Yaretkoro: you had better accompany us on the first part of our journey. Judging by your map, you will able to turn northward after two or three days and cut across country to your own town. But initially you will be safer with us than travelling alone.”
Yaret bowed.
“Really?” said Rothir. “Safer?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“What would you have voted for, Tiburé?” Arguril asked her.
“That is irrelevant. Let’s eat now, and rest while we can.” Tiburé looked up at the dimming sky. “Night will fall soon.”
“And tomorrow the stonemen will come,” said Maeneb.
They retreated into the cave. Arguril busied himself in setting out food; bread and salted meat and fibrous dried fruit. Yaret contributed some of her own supplies, but had to force herself to eat. Concern for her two donkeys gnawed at her, along with wonder and revulsion every time she thought about the stonemen.
And as for her grandfather… She did not think she was naïve. With adulthood had come the awareness that her grandparents must have some secret elements to their lives. She had just not expected this particular secret.
And he thought she’d had a sheltered life! Yaret tried to consider this objectively. Although she saw herself as adventurous, it was true she’d never ventured very far from her grandfather’s route.
All the same, she’d had to learn to look after herself. If she was sheltered – from stonemen, from war, from the woes of the world – then it was because Obandiro was sheltered. Was that a bad thing?
Well, let it be. She tried to put her grandfather out of her head, and listened to the others talking.
They spoke quietly in Vonnish, their voices echoing around the space. Maeneb said little and sat back from the others. Rothir attended to Eled, who was propped up against the cave wall, feeding him bread and talking to him in a deep, reassuring murmur. Eled still looked exhausted: barely awake enough to eat, let alone reply.
Of the other three, Arguril seemed the most voluble – he was keen to make his voice heard, she thought, although he deferred to his elders. Parthenal and Tiburé seemed to speak as equals. Some of the time she had the feeling that they were discussing her.
But she had no proof of that. When odd words that she knew leapt out from their conversation, they were chiefly place names. Kelvha was mentioned, and a place, or thing, called Thield. That recurred several times. Huldarion was another word that sprung out as being a likely name; there was something in the way they said it, with respect and even awe, that marked it out to her.
Other words caught her attention too. The Vonnish word for bread, she realised as they offered it around, was not so different from the Standard, except that the consonant was softer and the vowel had slipped and become long and low. As the waterskins were passed from hand to hand she discovered that the same applied to the Vonnish word for water – and when they talked about the drowsing Eled, she thought she recognised the words for sick and sleep. It seemed to her that Vonnish might be a dialect or relative of Standard rather than an entirely separate language.
If so, however, it was not a dialect that she could easily understand. The words that echoed gently round the cave for the most part meant no more to her than the wistful chatterings of the Darkburn. She remembered those bubbling waters, the grasses and dead leaves at its verge… the leaning trees, a cage of branches… an insect clutching at a stem, climbing, climbing… and her head rolled forward, waking her with a start.
She opened her eyes, to see Tiburé looking at her with a faint, thin smile.
“Lie down before you fall over,” she advised; so Yaret did.
She awoke to grey light and movement around her. The Riders were getting ready to leave. Despite the cloak that someone had thrown over her, she was cold and stiff. She had to flex each of her aching limbs in turn before she could rise and gather up her gear.
What should she do with all her baggage? There were no donkeys to carry it for her now; and it hardly seemed fair to burden the Riders’ horses any further. They could take her bedroll and remaining food but not everything else.
“Leave what you don’t need,” said Tiburé, seeing her staring down at her packs.
“I don’t carry stuff that I don’t need,” she answered shortly. No doubt Tiburé would see no necessity for her pile of woollen cloth and samples; but she couldn’t leave them all behind. Quickly she picked out the best of the samples and folded them into her light canvas backpack, along with a bit of extra clothing and one or two other precious possessions – the map and letter and Gramma’s honey included. She would carry that pack herself rather than burden one of the Riders. It was not heavy.
She left behind her second pan, the undelivered cloth and the less valuable samples, her oldest shirt, the inedible dried meat and – with a wrench of regret – her musical gourd. It was not heavy, but it was an awkward shape to carry. She hoped some future visitor to the cave would appreciate it.
Rothir came up while she was still staring at the gourd on top of the pile.
“Are you ready?” he asked. She nodded. “Then can you bear to ride behind Eled again? Tiburé is light enough to do it, but you’re used to him, and Narba has become used to you. Later, when we’re on easier ground, others can take a turn.”
“All right.” She turned resolutely away from her belongings, shouldered the backpack and walked out to where the horses waited. “Which way are we going?” she asked Parthenal.
“North.” He pointed to the head of the fissure, at the steep uphill path.
“I would like to look for my donkeys first, if there is time,” she said.
“No time, no point,” said Parthenal. Emerging from the cavern, Rothir added,
“Parthenal has already scouted the side of the tarn to check for any pursuers. None were visible. Neither were your donkeys.”
Yaret bit her lip. How could she leave without Dolm and Nuolo? How could she abandon them without even knowing what had happened to them? She almost felt inclined to say that she would stay behind and wait for them to reappear, foolish though that would be.
“We might have a better chance of seeing them from higher up,” suggested Rothir.
She nodded. Then she helped him to mount Eled onto Narba’s back and settle his leg into its support, before climbing up herself.
“How do you feel?” she asked Eled, and got the reply “Better.” She doubted if it was true.
They were the only two on horseback. All the others led their horses rather than ride them up this steep and dangerous path. When Yaret looked down into the valley on her right she could pick out the trail left the previous day by the darkburn, and imagined it racing through the tussocky grass. Although there was no lingering smell or taste of fear, the mere sight of the charred trail made her stomach clench.
Rothir, who was leading Narba, took it slowly, pausing at times to choose the easiest way.
“It’s lucky he’s such a stolid horse,” he commented.
“Yes,” said Yaret tersely. She was clinging tight to Eled, not through fear for herself but because of the awareness of her responsibility for the injured man. Once more he bore his trials stoically. Yet she could tell when the jolting hurt him – not by any sound he made, but by the frequent tensing of his body.
She began to sing to him, softly, a travelling song whose repetitive phrases were meant to match the rhythm of a walking horse. It seemed to help to distract Eled: the tensing became less noticeable.
“I like your songs,” he said.
“Do you? What do you like best about them?”
“It’s… I… They’re just nice.”
She felt like weeping for the childishness of the comment. He seemed a man simplified and stripped down. What remained was, she thought, a very likeable man; but there was not enough of him.
At least the songs carried them up the narrow, winding path without Eled beginning to slide off. As the hillside rose the stream beneath them did not, but became increasingly distant, a thin flickering ribbon held by a gash in the ground. She tried not to look down at that alarming drop: but none the less her attention was caught by a long, sparse waterfall which threw itself from a rocky shelf to break into a sparkling haze of droplets before reforming as the stream below.
“Look there,” said Tiburé suddenly, pointing to the waterfall’s base. Yaret gazed down at the pool where it landed, but could see nothing strange until Arguril said,
“Is that the darkburn?”
“It looks like it,” said Rothir.
And then she realised that the black stone almost submerged in the water was not a stone at all: and that the curling spire of mist above it was not spray but steam.
“It must have fallen from the path, or simply stumbled the wrong way,” said Tiburé.
“Not very clever, are they?” commented Arguril.
“They have no thoughts that I can decipher,” Maeneb said in her bell-like voice. “That is not to say they have no thoughts.”
Nobody volunteered to go and check the drowned darkburn. They moved on, up to the brow of the hill. But as they neared it, another, higher brow appeared.
“Wait here,” said Parthenal. He strode up to the further ridge and when he reached its top lay down on the ground to look over it at a view she could not see.
“All seems clear,” he reported on returning, “but we can take nothing for granted.”
No donkeys, then. She might have to resign herself to losing them for ever.
If they were alive, they could, it was true, look after themselves; there were probably wild donkeys in the area that they could join with. They might even be capable of making their way back home. Although it must be a two week journey from this spot, Nuolo and Dolm were used to long expeditions and always seemed to head off in the right direction. But she would not know where to begin to search for them in this wide, bleak, chilly landscape.
“Maeneb? What is your opinion? Can you detect the stonemen?” asked Tiburé.
Maeneb tilted her head reflectively and then spoke in Vonnish. Yaret was able to pick out a word that might have meant movement – Maeneb said it twice – and another word that she thought might be ‘west’.
“Then we will not go west,” said Tiburé in Standard, confirming her impression. Arguril began to object until Tiburé quelled him with a look. “I’ll ride behind Eled now,” she said. Yaret dismounted with relief.
The respite did not last long, however. After a short rest for Eled’s sake – during which Tiburé administered a couple more drops of the medicine she called ethlon – they all mounted their horses and continued at a much faster pace than before.
This time Yaret found herself seated uncomfortably on Tiburé’s wiry black horse, which was sure-footed enough but showed no inclination to respond to any of her instructions. She used legs and reins in vain before giving up and letting the horse choose his own path.
Looking west she saw the crags where she had found the riders; she thought she identified the distant pointing thumb, but it was already retreating as the troop rode on. Arguril was muttering impatiently.
“We can’t go any faster,” Tiburé told him.
“You could try.”
“I could try,” added Eled. “The ethlon is doing its job. I do feel better now.”
“Well…” Tiburé urged the horse into a gentle trot, and then into a canter. It lasted only a few moments before she pulled up again, saying something about Eled. Yaret could see that despite his assurances he was trembling.
“It’s not good for the horse either,” said Rothir.
“But we’re too slow,” said Arguril obstinately, and continued with a stream of Vonnish in which Yaret again noticed the word ‘Thield.’ At the mention of it, Tiburé shook her head.
None the less Arguril kept making the same plea, or something like it, until they reached a cliff edge that descended steeply to the plain which Yaret had glimpsed briefly from the thumb.
When she paused to gaze down at it now, she saw that apart from the Coban hills far to her left there was nothing in this landscape that she knew. It was twined with streams, and dotted with strange bulbous trees. The distant mountains showed their edges like stone knives. Between the mountains and the plain, but far away, there was a strange blank patch of white: an enormous fog bank, maybe. She wondered if it hid some lake.
“Come on,” said Parthenal sharply, and she followed the others as they descended from the land of crags by a rough staircase cut into the cliff. It was a long, awkward descent, and no less awkward when they reached the bottom. The plain was punctuated with rocks that stuck out of the ground at all angles, smaller than the thumb but no less singular: grey fingers reaching from the soil. The bulbous trees squatted amidst them but their needle-thin leaves gave little cover.
The group wound their way through this land for some hours, crossing and re-crossing the meandering streams, always heading towards the mountains. By the time they halted, the summits were tinted pink by the falling sun. They looked like giant flint arrowheads.
That made her think of home: of sitting on a wall while Colne the fletcher showed her how to knap stone into an arrowhead, and his son Dalko – her lover at the time – stood laughing at them nearby. A very long time ago it seemed now, and in a different world. A softer world of easy comfort and long meals and Dalko’s over-ready laughter. This world was altogether sharper and more vivid and there was nothing she could see in it to laugh about at all.
As they unloaded the horses under one of the bulbous trees, some discussion was going on. Arguril looked pleased; it seemed that he had at last won his argument.
“Arguril will leave us tomorrow morning,” Rothir told her. “He’ll head west.”
“Is it not dangerous for him to go that way? I thought that Maeneb said…”
Both Parthenal and Rothir turned to look at her. Parthenal’s eyes had hardened.
“She said what?” he demanded. “Maeneb said nothing in Standard.”
“But your Vonnish word for west is similar. Also path. And movement. And tired, and sick. And a great number of your other words, I think. They are like the Standard words turned round and shifted.” She spoke several of the Vonnish words that she had heard, to demonstrate.
Parthenal raised one eyebrow. Rothir was silent for a moment before saying,
“You’re right, they are related. Most people don’t realise; not that quickly, anyway. It is true that there may be stonemen to our west, but they march on foot. Arguril will be reasonably safe on a swift horse, on open ground where he can see them coming.”
Yaret was tempted to ask the meaning of Thield, or of Huldarion. Instead she nodded and held her tongue.
Turning to attend to Eled, she tried both to make him comfortable and to keep him sufficiently awake to eat and drink. Rothir handed her some sops of bread and shredded meat which she offered to the sick man, feeding him by hand, for when her raised his own arms they were shaking. It worried her. Even the sodden bread seemed difficult for him to swallow.
And it was cold in the darkening air: again, they risked no fire. She sat with an arm around Eled beneath the goat-hair blanket, hoping to give him extra warmth. Parthenal sat nearby and watched them, his intent gaze unsettling. Maeneb stood apart, looking out on sentry duty.
“Any sign of stonemen?” Rothir asked her. Maeneb shook her head.
“Perhaps they’ve given up,” said Arguril.
“That does not change our plan,” said Tiburé severely.
“How many days to this place called Farwithiel?” Yaret asked, and heard the resignation in Rothir’s voice as he replied.
“At this rate, three or four.”
“We’re going backwards,” muttered Parthenal.
“You don’t have to come backwards with us,” Rothir said. “Go on with Arguril.”
Parthenal shook his head. “I’ll be needed more here.” You need more than one man, Yaret thought was the implication, though between them the three women and Rothir could surely handle Eled.
But Parthenal might think that they would need to fight. Tiburé was obviously capable with a sword, and she had witnessed Maeneb’s skill with a knife as well as bow. None the less they would not have Parthenal’s strength or reach.
And as for she herself… she had not been fast enough with her bow in yesterday’s fight. She needed to sharpen up. To not be a liability, which was how Parthenal undoubtedly saw her at present.
“Why are the stonemen pursuing you? Are you at war?” she ventured to ask.
“Yes,” said Parthenal at the same time as Rothir answered, “No.”
“Undeclared,” said Rothir.
“Long-standing,” said Parthenal. “We have been enemies for a dozen years.”
“Since we left Caervonn,” said Rothir, earning a dubious glance from Parthenal.
“That’s a long time for a war to come to no conclusion,” Yaret observed.
“We are not at war,” said Rothir. “Call it a series of incidents, if you like.”
“But much more frequent over the last year,” said Parthenal.
“And the darkburns? Have they also been at war with you a dozen years?”
“Not independently. They are used by the stonemen.”
“We think they were created twelve years ago,” said Parthenal, “as instruments of war.”
“No, the darkburns are much older,” said Yaret without thinking.
“Older? What makes you say so?”
“Ah….” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Or at least, I can’t explain. It’s just a feeling.”
“Then don’t hypothesise. It doesn’t help,” said Rothir abruptly. “We need knowledge. Feelings are no use.”
Parthenal looked at him keenly and said a few words in Vonnish. One of them was ‘tired.’ Rothir shrugged and nodded.
Yaret became aware of her own tiredness. The rising moon was brightening as the sky darkened.
Huntress of the heavens, look after my donkeys, she thought. Waves of weariness and sadness rolled over her as she began to unroll her bedding. The Riders too were stretching out, wrapped in their cloaks, seeming oblivious to the hard chill of the ground. But to her it felt harder and chillier than it ever had.
She was trying to set her mind to sleep, when the peace was broken by a sharp cry from Maeneb. Somewhere behind her there was a clatter of stone on stone and a faint snort of breath.
All the other riders were instantly on their feet, swords outstretched and ready. Yaret scrambled upright, fumbling for her bow and quiver – too slow again, she thought.
Then Parthenal laughed. Trotting out of the dusk towards them came two shadows that hardened into a pair of donkeys: first Dolm, and then Nuolo. Dolm wandered up to Yaret and stuck his head in her pack, hunting oats. Nuolo butted her gently in the chest.
Yaret stroked the donkey’s rough back and hugged them both, not caring what Rothir or the other Riders thought. Her feelings for her donkeys might be of no use to anybody but she would not be without them. Gladness flooded through her. She gave her silent, heartfelt thanks to the huntress of the sky, even though the donkeys must have been already close by when she had made her plea.
But that didn’t matter, for here they were, unharmed. They were safe; all of them, safe now. She would take the donkeys home with her and Eled would be cared for at the place they called Farwithiel. As Nuolo nuzzled her, Yaret smiled into the dusk. The donkeys’ reappearance was a sign that everything would be all right.