Sorceress Of The Witch World

XVII

Simon Tregarth had the skill of one who had long laid ambushes, or avoided those of the enemy, in the wild lands of the Karsten mountains. He scouted ahead, sometimes ordering us to remain in hiding until he had explored and then hand-signaling us on. I could not understand what had so aroused his suspicion, unless it was something in the very lay of the land, but I trusted in that suspicion as our safeguard.

We did not use mind touch because this was a haunted land. Twice my mother ordered us into hasty detours around places where her arts told of the lurking of the Shadow. One of these was a hillock on which stood a single monolith of stone, dusky red under the sun. No grass or shrubs grew there; the earth was hard and had a blackened look as if it might once have been burnt over. And the pinnacle itself, if one looked at it for more than an instant, flickered in outline, appeared to change shape. I averted my curious eyes quickly, knowing it was not well to see what might reform from that misty substance.

Our second detour nearly plunged us into disaster. It was caused by a spread of wood wherein the trees were leafless, not as might normally be because of the early season, but because the foliage had been replaced by yellowish lumps or excrescences with pinkish centers, sickening to behold. They might have been open sores eating the unwholesome flesh of the vegetation. One had a queasy feeling that not only were those trees deformed and loathsome, but that something crawled and crept in their shade, unable to issue forth into the sunlight, but waiting, with an ever ravening hunger, for the moment it might grow strong enough to leap.

To pass this ulcerous mass we had to strike south, and the wood proved then to be much wider than we had first suspected, with fingers of leprous vines and brush. It was like a beast, belly-down on the earth it contaminated, crawling ever forward by digging those fringe growths into the soil to drag its bulk along. At one point those holds were on the river bank and we halted there in perplexity.

We would either have to batter our way through them, a task we shrank from, or take to the water, unless we could negotiate a very narrow strip of gravel below the overhang of the bank. And with Ayllia to care for that would be far from easy.

Then sounds carrying over the water set us all to lying low on the earth of the upper bank, a thin screen of growth between us and the water below. I choked as a breeze blew toward me, passing over the tainted growth nearby—the stench nearly drove all the wholesome air from my lungs. Yet we had no chance to withdraw, for out on the far bank of the river came those whose voices carried, not with distinguishable words, but rather as a rise and fall of sound.

For a moment or two I believed them survivors of the village raid, as they were certainly of the same breed as the Vupsalls. But as the newcomers splashed into the shallows to fill their water bags, I did not recognize any face among them. And I noted that while their dress was generally the same, they wore a kind of brightly woven blanket folded into a narrow strip across one shoulder, rather than the cloaks of Utta’s clan.

They were in no hurry to move on; in fact the women and children settled down, preparing to make a fire and set up their three-legged cooking pots. Some of the men pulled off their boots and took to the water, crying out as they felt its chill, but persevering, to spread a net among them and sweep it for water dwellers.

For the first time I felt Ayllia stir on her own and I turned quickly. That blankness of non-expression was fading; her eyes focused with intelligence on that busy scene, and I saw recognition in them. She raised her head, and I feared that, though these newcomers were not Vupsalls, yet she knew some among them, and would call out for their attention. I tried to grasp her hand, but she twisted away, striking out at me, her blow landing on the side of my head to momentarily daze me. Then she was on her hands and knees, not trying to reach that party overstream, but scuttling away from them, as if she saw not friends but deadly enemies—which could well be with the many feuds in existence.

Had she merely headed back, away from the river’s edge, all might still have been well. But in her blind haste she went west, straight for that nightmare growth. And we all knew that she must be stopped before she reached it.

My father threw himself in her direction and an outstretched hand managed to close vise-tight about her ankle, jerking her flat on her face. At least she did not cry out—perhaps her fear of the tribesmen was such that it kept her silent. But she curled around to attack her captor with teeth, nails, all the natural armament she possessed.

But what was worse than that fierce struggle (in which Simon was plainly winning the upper hand) was that the evil vines toward which their battling carried them began to stir. Not as if any wind had brushed them into motion, but as if they had serpents’ awareness of what moved close by and were preparing to attack.

In that moment both my mother and I united in a blanketing mind send meant to subdue Ayllia, whose frantic struggles might not only betray us to those across the stream, but could carry her and my father into the grip of those vines now poised in the air as if about to strike.

Ayllia went limp as our mind bolt struck her deeply into bondage. My father lay an instant or two panting, half across her. But it was the vines which frightened me.

They, too, were studded with those loathsome bulbous knots. And now, as the stems set up a wild writhing, the bulbs cracked open. My mother cried out and rose to run forward, with me following.

We caught at whatever portion of the two bodies was the nearest, jerking them away from proximity to the vines. And we were none too soon, for at least one of the knots burst across, loosing in the air a stream of menacing motes. Luckily they did not float toward where we scrambled frantically to get out of range, but drifted to the ground under the writhing stems.

It seemed we had escaped some grave danger only to fall into another. There were sudden shouts from the river bank and I looked hastily around. The fishermen had dropped their net, were splashing toward us, steel in hand.

“Link!” My mother’s command rang in my head. “Link—hallucinate!”

I do not know what manner of picture she had selected to give us cover, but what came out of our joining of Power was indeed enough to stop the tribesmen short in midstream, set their women and children screaming and running. Before my eyes, and I was one who was giving Power to raise that guise, my two conscious companions became monsters. Such was their being that I knew these mental pictures had not taken shape by any will of ours. Nor did I doubt that I, myself, must equal them in horror. Of us all only Ayllia, lying as if dead under my father’s hands, remained in human seeming.

There was a sudden faltering, lasting only for a breath, in my mother. Her astonishment must have been equal to my own. She stood erect on two misshapen clawed feet, great taloned paws swaying menacingly, her demon’s mask of a face turned upon those in the stream. And from her throat came a roar which was enough to crush eardrums.

Seeing her, the tribesmen broke and ran after their womenfolk. And we were left, trying to avoid viewing one another.

“Break.” My father pulled himself to his feet, stooped to swing Ayllia up over a horn-plated shoulder. “We have served our purpose—so break.”

Break the illusion? But we had instinctively tried that as soon as the tribesmen ran. However, though we no longer fed the hallucination, it remained in force. The monster who had been Jaelithe turned slowly to stare at the hideous wood.

“It would seem,” she mouthed between thick purple lips, “that we have wrought our spell too close to that which could twist and turn it to unsightly purpose. We did not achieve invisibility but went far too far in the opposite direction. Also, I do not see the means of breaking this yet—”

And in me then arose a sharp sword of fear to cut and thrust, so that I shivered and quailed. For once before I had worn the stigmata of the Shadow, and so harsh had been that burden that it had driven me to things I hated to remember. Kemoc, by his own blood, shed in mercy, had won me back then to human kind. But at first I had known terror and self-disgust. Were we doomed again to carry such befoulment?

“Let there be a time for shedding later,” my father agreed. “I think we are better off the farther we get from this growing cesspool of vileness.”

We trailed him down to the river wherein he boldly splashed. I thought that for now we need not fear the return of the tribe. The water rose about us, and in a way that was reassuring, as it is one of the fundamentals of the Power as opposed to the Shadow, that running water can, in itself, be used as a barrier to evil. I almost expected my monster-seeming to vanish as that current washed strongly about my warted and scaled skin. But it did not and we came ashore unopposed in the half-set camp of the tribe.

Seeing some of their packs lying there I became practical and went hunting, finding and filling a sack with what dried foodstuffs were spilled out and around. But my mother passed me, her horned and horrible head down and bent as if she sniffed a trail. At last her taloned paws rent open a tightly lashed basket, turning out dried herbs, which her long and filthy nails sorted until she scooped up a scant handful of twigs and leaves, dried and brittle.

We lingered no longer at the river, but turned westward again. Now my father did not scout ahead, relying on his monster-seeming to be a defense, carrying Ayllia, while we flanked him on either side. A strange and forbidding company we must have made if any of the tribe lurked in hiding to watch our going. I doubted that for even the great hounds had caught the contagion of their masters’ panic and had joined in the rout.

“When it is safe”—my mother’s words were almost as distorted as the new mouth which formed them—“I think that I have that which will return us to ourselves again.”

“Good enough,” was Simon’s answer. “But let us have more distance traveled behind us first.”

On this side of the river the country opened out into a meadowlands. Perhaps these had once been farms, though we came across no signs of walling or any hint of buildings.

But my belief that man had once lived here in peace and plenty was affirmed when we came to lines of trees. These were not the twisted, evil things of that terrible wood, but were flushed with the petals of early flowering, and they formed an orchard which had been planted so.

Some were dead, split by storm, battered by the years. But enough still flowered as a promise that life did continue. And life did, for birds nested among them in such numbers as to surprise, unless they depended upon early fruit to sustain them.

Just as that other wood had been a plague spot of evil, so here was a kind of benediction, as if this had been a source of good. I could smell the scent of herbs, faint but unmistakable. Whoever had once planted or tended this orchard had also set out here those growing things which were for healing and good. There were no blue stones of security set up, only a peace and wholesomeness to be felt.

And there we took our rest. While Ayllia slept, my mother brought out the cup made as clasped hands. Holding it in her talons, she turned her head slowly from side to side, until as one who sees a guide point directly ahead, she went down one of the lines of trees until she came to a dip in the ground. I went after her, drawn by the same elusive scent.

A spring bubbled in a basin which my two arms might have encircled. About it stood the first tender growing green ringed by small yellow flowers—those which in my childhood we had called “stareyes” and which are very frail and last but a day, but are the first blooms of spring.

My mother knelt and filled the cup half full from the spring. Carrying it with care, she returned to our temporary camp under the trees.

“A fire?” she asked my father.

His horned and fanged head swung from side to side. “Is it necessary?”

“Yes.”

“So be it.”

I was already gathering from under the dead trees their long shed branches, choosing those I knew would give forth sweet-smelling smoke, dry enough to burn quickly and brightly.

My father laid a small fire with care, and once done he put spark from his lighter box to it. At my mother’s nod I fed to the rising flames some of those herbs she had taken from the tribe’s packets.

Jaelithe leaned above the fire, holding the cup in her two hands. Now she stared into its depths. I saw the water it held cloud, darken, then serve as a background to throw into bright relief a picture. It was my father who stood in the depths of that cup, not as the monster who tended the fire, but as the man. I realized what we must do and joined my will to hers. Even so it was a struggle. Slowly that picture in the cup changed. It grew misshapen, monstrous, as we watched and willed. Finally it was completely the thing which had led us across the river.

When that was so my mother blew into the cup so that the picture was broken and only water remained, as clear as it had been at her first dipping. But when we raised our heads and tried to straighten the cramp in our shoulders, my father was again the man.

Then my mother passed the cup, not to me, but to my father. Though she looked at me somewhat ruefully, if such an expression could be read on the twisted countenance which was now hers, and she gave me an explanation: “He who is closest—”

I was already nodding. She was right—to my father would the mind picture be the sharpest now.

So in turn I lent my will to his, while she rested. But I was growing more and more tired, must force myself to the struggle. In the cup my mother slowly changed from a woman of great and stately beauty to monster, until we were sure it was safely done, and my father blew the demon mirrored on the water into nothingness.

“Rest,” my mother then bade me, “for what is left we two shall do together, even as we gave you life in the beginning.”

I lay back upon the ground, saw my mother and father lean above the cup, and knew that therein they would paint me as they had seen me. But we had been so long separated, was the “me” they would build there the “me” I myself would see in any mirror? It was an odd thought, a little disturbing. I looked away from where they wrought their spell, up into the flowering branches of the tree under which I rested. In me arose such a great desire to remain where I was, to lose all the burdens I had carried, that I yearned to remain here always at rest.

There was tingling along my body, yet I did not care. My eyes closed then and I think I slept. When I awoke the sun was far warmer and lay in slanting beams which told me that a goodly portion of the day must now be behind us. I wondered that we had not gone on.

But as I raised my head and looked along my body I saw that I had indeed returned to my proper guise. My mother sat with her back to the trunk of a tree, and my father lay prone, his head in her lap. He slept, I thought, but she was awake, her hand stroking his hair gently, smoothing it back from his forehead. She did not look at him, rather into the distance, though there was a smile on her lips which softened her usual stern expression—it was even tender, as if she remembered happy things.

In me awoke again that faint desolation, that sense of emptiness which had come before when I had witnessed the expression of their feeling for one another—as if I were one who looked into a warm and comfortable room from outside, where the dark of a chill night closed about me. I almost wanted to break that contentment which I read in my mother’s face, say to her, what of me, of ME? Kyllan has found one who is so to him, and Kemoc, also. But me—I thought I had such in Dinzil. Is it true, what I learned from him, that any man who looks upon me sees only a tool to further his ambition? Must I turn my mind resolutely from such hopes and follow the narrow, sterile road of the Wise Women?

I sat up and my mother looked to me. I had indeed broken her dream, but not by my full will. Now her smile widened, reached also to me, in warmth.

“It is a thing to weaken one, such spelling. And this is a good place in which to renew body and spirit.”

Then my father stirred also and sat up, yawning. “Well enough. But it is not good to dream away the whole day. We need to make more distance for what remains of the sun and light.”

It seemed that our rest period had been good for Ayllia too, or else my mother had released her from the full mind block that she might not be so great a drag on us. She roused enough to walk after we had eaten a portion of the supplies we had taken from the tribe.

So we left that oasis of good in the old orchard. As I passed beneath the last of the flowering trees I broke off a twig, holding the blossom close to my nose so I could smell its fragrance, tucking it then into my hair that I might bear with me some of the peace and ancient joy of that place. Oddly enough, the fragrance, instead of growing less as the flowers wilted, became stronger, so that I might at last have laved my whole body in some perfume distilled from their substance.

Our camp that night was on the top of a small hill from which we could keep watch in all directions. We did not light any fire, but when the dark closed about us we could see a distant point of light which was a fire, or so Simon believed. And since it lay to the south he thought it might mark the camp of the tribe, though it was well away from the river; perhaps they had not returned there, even to gather up what they had abandoned in their flight.

Again we slept in turn. But this time I had the middle hours of the night. And when I was aroused by my mother to take that watch, I found it chill enough to keep my cloak tight about me. Ayllia lay a little beyond, and it was shortly after my mother had gone to sleep that I heard the barbarian girl stir. She was turning her head from side to side, muttering. And that mutter became whispered speech as I leaned closer to listen. What I heard was as much a warning of danger as if she had rung some manor alarm.

“West—to the evil wood—across the river south—west again—to the orchard—then west to a hillock among three such, but standing higher than the other two. West—to what they name the Green Valley—”

Three times she repeated it before she was silent. And I was left with the belief that she herself was not trying to memorize our route, but rather reported it to another. Reported it! To whom, and for what reason?

Her people had been killed or scattered and taken captive by the sea raiders, and I did not believe that any among them could evoke the mind anyway. Her actions today had been those born in fear when she had seen the other tribe. Did they by chance have some seeress like Utta who had traced us thus? It could be true, but that was not the first and best answer I imagined.

Hilarion! He would not have tried to contact me, or my parents, knowing that any such contact, be it the most tenuous, would have been an instant warning. Then he would have had to try complete take-over. But Ayllia, by our standards, was a weakling, to be easily played upon by anyone learned in sorcery. Therefore he could reach out and work upon her—and now he was using her to keep track of us.

All my fears of what he might be or could do flooded back. But at the same time there was a weakness in me also, for I remembered that touch my mother had made for me, how I had tasted the terrible loneliness which had rent him as he understood what had happened to the world he had known and dreamed of returning to while he stood in Zandur’s pillar.

I had never believed him actively evil, only one of those who, following a trail which interested them, could be ruthlessly self-centered, acting recklessly out of curiosity and confidence in themselves. So had he been once, and if he remained so, then he was a threat to what was being built here anew in Escore. If he could track us to the Green Valley . . . !

We could mind block Ayllia completely again. But if we did so she would be only an inert bundle, needing to be carried and constantly tended. And there surely lay many dangers ahead which would make such a captive our bane and perhaps even our deaths. We could abandon her, but that, too, was unthinkable. And the final decision was not mine but to be shared by the three of us.

During the rest of my hours of watch I listened, not only to the noises of the night, but to any sound from Ayllia. She slept untroubled, however.

When I roused my father to take the final watch I warned him of what I had heard, that he might be alert in turn, even though there was certainly little more that she could report.

In the morning we took council together. My mother was very thoughtful as she considered my ideas.

“I do not believe in a tribal seeress doing this,” she said. “Your Utta must have been unique among those people. Hilarion is the more reasonable answer. Upon us may now rest an error in judgment for leaving him behind.”

“But—” I protested.

“Yes, but and but and but. There are many ifs and buts to be faced in every lifetime and we can choose only what seems best at the moment when the choice is to be made. We have the Power, which makes us more than some, but we must be ever on the alert not to think that it makes us more than human. I think we dare not mind block her. It would render her too great a burden on us. Also, I would set no rearguard cover spell. Such can be as easily read as plain footprints in muddy earth by one like Hilarion. Better to let him think we suspect nothing while we plan ahead for a defense needed at our journey’s end.”

My father nodded. “As ever, you put it clearly, my witch wife. Our first need is to cross this country to where we shall find friends. To be thought less than we are, not more, is a kind of defense in itself.”

They were logical, right. Yet as we started on in the first daylight, I had a feeling that I must now and then look behind me, almost as if some barely perceptible shadow crept behind, always fluttering into hiding just upon my turning so that I never saw it; only sensed it was there.