There was a weight across his body, a throbbing in his arm. Naill raised his head. Light—growing light. . . . His eyes squinted and then he forced the lids further up. The weight on his chest was his left arm splinted and bound. And the light was that of day.
“Illylle!” She had been with him in the river; that held through the haze and pain. And now she slid down a boulder at his call. In one hand she carried a leaf-twist container from which water splashed. As she held that to his mouth, Naill drank thirstily.
“Can you walk?” Her hands were under his shoulders, trying to raise him. She spoke brusquely, her question a demand.
“There is need?” Naill was alert enough now to measure what might trigger her concern.
“There is need.”
He was on his feet, a little lightheaded, but ready to move. Matter-of-factly Ashla came to him, drew his right arm across her shoulders, and started him along between the rocks.
They appeared to have come ashore in a barren waste. No green showed, and the rocks glittered in the growing light. They would have to find a refuge from the sun or be blinded until evening. But where?
“Where do we go?” Naill asked her, hoping for some concrete answer.
“Up.” Her reply was ambiguous. But climb they did, and that was a chancy business, though they went slowly and the terrain was rough and broken enough to provide a kind of natural stair in places.
They finished that climb on a height facing broken lands riven by crevices out of which curled, as might tongues of green smoke, twisted spires of vegetation, more gray than green, Naill’s eyes told him. And there was no promise here of a welcoming forest. Suddenly Naill stiffened against the girl’s steadying arm.
“Which side of the river?” He asked that with more emphasis than he had used before.
“The north.”
“This is the waste.” He did not need any confirmation from Ashla. The very feel of the place caught at him as might a breath of corruption out of a long-sealed kalcrok pit. All he could see were rocks and those ravines choked with ill-shaped growth. Yet—as he had before on the road to the Mirror—he sensed a lurking, a scouting—a spying. Not on his part, or Ashla’s—but something . . . out there . . .
“This is a waste,” she repeated almost stolidly. “But the sun is rising. We cannot return to the river. And twice the port flyer has cruised overhead.”
There were strong arguments for going to ground here, yet still they were weak ones in the face of what Naill felt as he looked out over this barren country and remembered Hoorurr’s warning. They had gone undetected, unharmed, to the Mirror, and returned. But all through the latter part of that journey, Naill had known with a strange certainty that safety lay only on the ancient road between those two walls, walls that had been erected with a purpose of defense . . . against what? And that road had been so very old—could the menace it had been walled to resist still exist?
“There is no choice,” Ashla continued, and Naill could feel a tremor in her arm about his shoulders. “We need not go far—and you have your sword.”
Naill saw now that the belt of that weapon weighed down her shoulder. Where she had found it, or how she had kept it through their river journey, he did not know. But he believed that in this time and place that Iftin-forged weapon was small protection indeed.
However, they had no choice. Perhaps he could make the shade of the nearest of those knife-slashed crevices, go to ground under its growth to wait out the day. But that was the best he could do.
“Get me over there.” He pointed to the nearest cut. “Then you go, keep close to the water and head as far west as you can before true sunrise. I do not know how far this extends—and you may be able to get out in an hour’s travel.”
She made no answer as she steered him ahead. What he suggested had only a small chance of success, but it was better, far better, than for her to remain here.
When Ashla did speak, it was to point out the easiest way down into the ravine, to warn against rough footing. And Naill was too engaged with battling through brush to argue with her. The stuff was brittle, oddly desiccated, as if, in spite of its appearance of life and growth, it was really dead and only preserved a semblance of what it had once been in truth.
There was an acrid smell to the snapped branches, crushed leaves, not the wholesome aroma of the forest country. As they neared the bottom of the cut, Naill saw pale, unwholesome plants close to ground level, puffy things with fleshy, tightly curled leaves.
“Here.” Ashla steered him right and halted. Part of a tree trunk still possessing a look of the true forest protruded from the wall of the gully, its heart long since decayed and eaten away, but its outer shell making a kind of wooden cave, which, to Naill, offered more natural roofing than the still-living vegetation about it.
But when he put out his hand to that old bark surface, he touched not the substance of long-dead wood, but the hardness of rock. The tree was petrified.
“This will serve me,” he told the girl quickly. “You must go, before the sun climbs.”
She had eased him down under the curve of the stone bark. Now she settled herself beside him composedly.
“We go together—if at all.”
Naill was alert to that hint of foreboding.
“If at all?”
All at once Ashla bent her head, covered her face with both hands. He was sure she was not weeping—not with running tears. But there was a kind of despair in the line of those hunched shoulders, that gesture with her hands, that held a hint of fear. Only for a moment did she sit so, and then her head came up, her hands dropped to lie on her knees. But her eyes remained closed.
“If—if it were only given me to remember—to know!” She cried out, not to him, Naill believed, but to the very circumstances of their being. “Illylle knew—so much she knew—but Ashla does not. And sometimes I cannot reach Illylle through Ashla! Naill, what do you know of Ayyar, truly know?” Her eyes opened, held his with a fierce intensity as if his answer was now the most important thing in the world, could lead to some salvation for both of them.
And it sparked in him a need to search his own mind for Ayyar and what Ayyar of the Iftin had known.
“I think”—he spoke slowly, wanting to be very sure of every limited fact, if fact could be the term for a recollection; he did know—”he was a warrior—and he was Lord of Ky-Kyc. But the meaning of that I do not remember. He was a Captain of the First Ring at Iftcan, and he battled there when the Larsh overran the Towers. He was a hunter and one who roved much in the forest. That is all I am sure of. Sometimes I pick a fruit, cross a trail, see or hear some animal or bird—and know what Ayyar knew of them. But of Ayyar I know very little.”
“Enough knowledge to keep you alive in the forest, and a little, very little, more than that,” she summed up.
Naill straightened. That—that made sense in a new way!
“Perhaps that was all Ayyar was meant to give me!” he burst out. “Enough forest lore to keep me alive! And all the rest—all that about the fall of Iftcan was something that was meant to be forgotten but was not!”
“If one has a recorder and must leave a message in a hurry”—Ashla caught up the tossed ball of his idea—”and the message lies in the middle of another report, then one could mark it, but still part of the report would intrude upon it.”
“A recorder?” Naill was surprised that she would choose such an example to illuminate her meaning. “But were recorders used by the Believers?”
“No. But when my mother had a blood affliction and the Speaker could not pray it away, her father—Bors Keinkind—came and took her to the port to see the off-world medico. I went with her, for she was unable to care for herself. But it was too late—had we gone earlier she might have been saved.” Ashla was quiet for a moment and then went on. “It was there I saw recorders and many other things . . . things to make one think—and wonder. Many times have I remembered and thought on what I saw there. But suppose this forest lore was important for survival—so you were given part of an Ayyar memory . . . and other parts of that memory also clung.”