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his side, no more powerful urging being needed for an Eshkorian beast, and he shot forward as if glad to be going.
I had to trust my luck, then, if luck I had, that no sudden subsidence or barrier would present itself. Till now the path had been mostly straight and always open, a fact the men behind me seemed to take for granted, coming at the pace they did. At all events, with them a day behind or less, I needed wings.
The dreams and retrospections sloughed from me.
The journey had shrunk to more natural if no less ominous proportions, and I should, in any case, have no margin for sleep the next “night”-this much was obvious.
For the hunt was up.
2
My horse was sound as a bell. He bore me through the tenth night spear-swift; the tenth day, after resting him and myself two hours, he took up our flight again as if it were a personal thing with him that I should get away. Indeed, on the eleventh night, my last in the tunnel, when I was scorcheyed and light-headed from missing sleep, I began to think my city wife, child of magician stock, had placed a magic on him to keep him fleet.
My last torch had burned out somewhere in the previous “day,” and I had appropriated a gold lamp from one of the rest-chambers, and lighted that. I had not wanted to use Their equipment, but had no choice.
About what I assumed to be midnight, I dismounted, knelt, and laid my ear to the paving. There was no vibration of hooves; no doubt the hunters took their ease at nights. I slept three hours, having observed the usual precaution of setting the iron water flask against my side; you need to be near dead not to turn in your sleep after an hour or so, and the hard object woke me each time, and each tune got a round
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cursing, but without it I should not have woken till the hounds had me by the throat.
Waking, and hearing no noise still, I walked the horse for a couple of hours before remounting, to save him. I should not be done with him, even at the tunnel’s end.
If the runnel ended. Maybe it was witch-work and had no end.
Then the lamp fluttered and went sick green and was suddenly extinguished.
The air was bad: it had a sour smell. The horse jerked his head, snorting, and my throat closed. I thought, Now I stifle in the dark, fine end to my escape. But I was not in the dark after all. As my eyes adjusted after the lamp, I could make out a jumble of rock ahead, and through that a shaft of gray that marked, however faintly, the outer world.
We went cautiously over the debris-it looked to me as if there had been some tremor of the earth that had cracked the rock and brought down the roof in one huge slab. It was the only blow that had befallen the architecture of the tunnel. There had been a broad stairway there before the quake, and probably another imposing arch-mouth to make men shrink. Nothing now but rubble, and an exit between broken blocks.
But no matter-soon I was breathing the world’s air, and the smell of that air was sweet as flowers. The horse shook his mane, and kicked the earth with his feet.
The tunnel emerged on the floor of a stony valley with, away at its sides, shallow sloping hills, black-green in the moment before dawn. The opening faced to the south-leftward the sun was rising from a blue veil of mist, one of those suns of earliest spring that seem to have no substance and no depth, yet flay the land with light.
That sun. It was like the air, better than any sun that ever rose. I could have yelled for pure gladness at being aboveground.
I looked back; the mountains were fading off north and west, many miles behind me now, their lower parts missing in the haze, their tops transparently glowing with the dawn, like islands in the sky.
I mounted and the horse sprang off, galloping southeast.
I had only two notions on the matter of direction. First, that the pursuers might guess I would strike back east and north, west even, to get on the old tribal routes, and lose my-
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self among my adoptive people. Second, that my shortest road to the sea lay southeast. The sea was a phenomenon I had never clapped eyes on for myself, yet it seemed, from the tales, a destination ultimate and uncompromising. The ocean’s edge, the brink of the land; the lip of Chaos. Who would reason the hunted wolf would run that way?
The fresh air had me drunk with optimism. My food was three days gone; I picked up stones from the way, and used my belt as a sling to get a hare for my dinner, a trick I had learned as a boy. Now that I was free of the tunnel, and the ground rising, I kept a check on what came behind me. Seeing no sign of followers through the daylight, I made a fire that night in a hollow of the low hills where young oak trees grew, and broiled the hare’s flesh, while the horse cheerfully cropped spring grass. There was even a pool to drink from among the trees. These normal things were bounty after the ungiving majesty of the under-mountain road.
I made on before Sunup. Having gained time, I had no mind to lose it again.
It was hilly country for the most part, though off to the east lay a flat, smoky plain, mirrored by countless dim green waters, so that it seemed at times portions of the bright sky had fallen there among its spreading osiers; the edge of some marshland I was glad to have bypassed.
The second night, there was a cave. I slept too comfortably and lost some hours riding.
That day the land peaked up, rough grassy country and thin woodland, spruce, oak saplings, pine and ivy-clad rockthrusts, and here and there a great white mound of limestone, old quarries mined no longer and sprinkled yellow with premature wildflowers.
Having got high enough, I watched some minutes among the trees, scanning through the cloudand sun-play over the terrain below and behind. It was raining northward, obscuring the insubstantial mountains. Presently, between the rain and the light, I made out a formation of dark specks. The hunt.
They were less than a day away from me already, and had gauged my direction. Perhaps they had seen me on the skyline ahead, or picked up the marks of hooves in the softer clays of the marsh-skirting slopes.
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I remembered, with a sour irony, how I had tracked the Eshkir slavers through the mountains the spring before, guided by then horses and their negligence.
I had rationed the hare, now ate none of it and rode on, dismounting at moonrise to rest the horse from me, but continuing on my feet and leading him. I had exercised care since I spotted the hunting party, keeping to cover, or skulking along under the tops of the hill crests.
With the hunt this close, I needed stratagem rather than pace.
I eventually foresaw I should have to relinquish my horse.
It is the oldest trick of the quarry to dismount, and thrash his beast on ahead to mislead those who come after, yet it is not a step to be taken lightly. Once the horse is gone, he is gone for good, and then you are on foot, half as slow and half as vulnerable again as you were before. However, you cannot instruct your horse not to release his dung, not to make dents with his feet in mud, and, unless you want him wind-broken and dead, you can only force him to race for just so long, and no longer.
The hunt had a guide, a clever one; I had reasoned this out. He could follow the horse tracks perfectly. The fifth dawn had come, and I saw riders gathered behind and below me hi a narrow green trough under the hills. There were only nine or ten of them, and one-the guide-kneeled on the ground among some rocks, examining the place where I had allowed myself an hour’s sleep. That decided me. They were gaming rapidly, the guide was astute, they anticipated I should ride till I dropped from my saddle with bone-weariness. Thus, I must let the horse run on alone, and hope to make fools of them.
I walked the horse till noon. The grassy hills had ragged tops of chalky stone; between, the way was level enough to give him some decent running. One of the Whip winds was blowing up from the north; at least he would not be plunging into it. I let him eat as we went, removed the bit and bridle, and loaded the saddle-pouches with clods and rocks to minimize the difference the depth of his tracks would show the guide, once I was off. I slung my water-flask about my neck, and set the horse easterly. I trusted he would not bolt onto the treacherous marshy plain, but keep to the edge of it.