“No boat is needed, is it, Zervarn?”
“I would prefer to travel in a boat. Where’s the craft you came in?”
“I?” He raised his brows.
Now he reminded me of Orek and Zrenn, both Demizdor’s kin rolled in one. Was this his major talent, to call up the characters of one’s past? He said even that she had named him for some guard who had died for her.
But now he was done with debating. He walked down the strand and onto the ice that fringed the river’s margin. Then onto the water of the river
He was nonchalant, the bastard. Sauntering, damn him.
Presently he turned and faced me, his feet balanced on the mild tidal shift of the estuary.
272
“This is how I crossed last night,” he said reproachfully. “Don’t try to pretend you can’t do the same.”
“She trained you well,” I said.
“When we were just weaned we went to her,” he called back. “To the Frightful Unknown, the Terror of Kainium.” He sprang around, agile as a snake, and began to run over the river away from me.
I glanced about like a fool, looking for my friend of yesterday with the fishing boat, but of course he had kept out of the way. The inn had been very merry last night, and very silent later. I had lain awake listening to it.
He was lengthening the gap between us. I had no choice, unless I stole a boat. It seemed pedantic, suddenly, my reserve.
I, too, stepped out onto the river, and went after him.
I had gone half a mile before he looked back and took note of me. He stopped once more then, balancing, and I saw him laughing; either that, or he was doubled in pain. Seventeen, and a magician. Well, he had something to make him cheerful, I supposed.
That should have been me, out there on the hyacinth water. Able to laugh, able to remain a boy for the duration of my boyhood, to become a man without going through the pit of hell to get there. That should have been me.
He began to flag after a couple of miles. I suspect he must have used a boat part of the way before; he had not quite the psychic strength, the full rein of Power to keep him up. Sweat broke on his fine pale forehead; his booted feet began to slop under the water. The far shore, dim with a fine morning mist, was coming closer, not quite close enough. I had drawn level with him. He stumbled and caught hold of my shoulder.
“Oh, Zervarn. I shan’t make it. Will you let me drown? There’s a girl from White Mountain, one of my Jahvetrix’s people; she’ll weep if I die. And, Zervarn, I shall die, believe it.”
I looked at him. His arrogance and fierce pride were mainly his youth. His laughter was his youth, too, and even now, he was half laughing, ashamed of himself. I perceived he had been strutting to impress me. I did not hate him, had no cause. So, she had favored him. It was not his fault she bound him with love. Even my father had been prey to love of her.
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Which was a curious thought. Somehow I had never imagined love between them, at least, no love on my father’s side for a witch he had married as adjunct to his kingdom.
“Keep your hand on my shoulder. It will prevent your sinking.”
“I know it.” We walked on, he with his boots clear of the water now. After a while, he said, “It’s most of a day’s journey to Kainium.”
The sun was rising, shining white on the blue estuary, blue on the black and misty land. We came ashore. A dog was barking, back over the river, sharp as flints in the frosty air. It was a very rational noise. I thought, / am leaving the rational world of men behind me. Just then I was aware of Mazlek attempting to read my thought. I had blocked his questing instinctively; now I turned and looked at him. I was all of twenty-one, but he made me feel like seventy.
“Are they every one of them like you, this bred herd of the goddess?”
“Every one,” he said. “But you will master us. You’re better.”
3
We did not overly converse on the journey. It was rough, snowy, uphill going, and thickly wooded farther on. At noon we paused by a frozen stream. He lay on his belly across the ice, staring down, saying to me he could see blue fish swimming far beneath. Another time he reached his hand into a tree and drew out a small sleeping rodent, admired it, and put it back without disturbing its slumbers.
We had gone inland somewhat from the coast; in the afternoon we angled back. The day was clear, and coming from the woodshore I saw the gray sweep of ocean on my right hand stretching into a far green horizon. Between the shore and the horizon, about a mile out and some way ahead of us to the north, a pointing ghostly shape rose up from the water.
“White Mountain?” I asked him.
“White Mountain,” he said. “It looks a chilly rock, but in spring and summer the island’s like a mosaic for colors. You’ll see.”
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I doubted that, but then I had not thought ahead. Where should I be in the spring and summer, the deed accomplished, the crisis passed?
An hour later the mountain in the sea looked no nearer, but I had begun to make out something below, in a fold of the coastline.
Kainium.
Not a live city, but a dead one. Old as the shore itself it seemed, maybe older in some incomprehensible way. I could hardly tell it from the snow save that, like the bones and teeth of any dead thing, it was slightly yellower. White mantled cypresses led down a broad paved road toward it, with a great arch on pillars fifty feet high straddling the thoroughfare about a mile off.
I had seen and dreamed enough to know the place for a metropolis of the Old Race. I would not even have needed that tutoring to smell it for something ancient and curious. It had a secretive brooding aspect under the snow. I wondered how much wickedness and magic had gone on there to leave this feel after so many centuries. And I wondered if she had deliberately selected this spot, and if she reveled in its proximity.
We went down the road, Mazlek and I, under the blue shadow of the pillared arch. The sea clawed at the icy beaches with a tearing, desolate noise, but no gulls cried, and there was no clamor of men or beasts.
Then I saw smoke mundanely rising to the left of the road, from a stand of trees, and next a building came in sight with a chimney-vent above.
“A hospice,” Mazlek said, “prepared to receive all who wish shelter. Mainly, the backlands folk who seek Karrakaz are afraid to enter a city of the Lost Race, and shun the hostel. But you naturally, lord, will welcome the luxuries of civilization.”
“Will I?”
He smiled.
“No trick, lord. Did you not save my life on the river?”
To say I did not trust him would be overcourteous, yet I was pained to admit I was glad of a diversion from my path. I should meet her before another sunrise, which was all at once too soon. An hour with hot water, a razor, and some thought would not be amiss. I had been bathing in fistfuls of snow and the smashed glass of pools, and for my beard and hair I looked like a wild man escaped from some carnival.
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Truly, I would rather not go to her like this. Not out of vanity-it was that she had left me to struggle up a savage, and I would not be one for her. I meant her to see, despite the odds, that the wolfs cub reared among hogs was yet a wolf, and fit to match her.
There were two flaxen attendants in the hostel, men who did not, presumably, fear the ruin or the witch. One shaved me and trimmed my hair as I lay soaking in a green sunken pit brimmed with the scalding water from the hypocaust. I asked him what he did there. He said his village lay over the hills to the west, that he had been a leper, but through the goddess of the mountain he had been cured. Then his service here was in payment for the cure? Not so. He liked the locality, the mystical aura of Power hereabouts stimulated him mage-craft he called it. He was inclined to chatter, so I questioned him. I asked him what his goddess was like. It turned out no one had seen her, saving, of course, her own people, those she elected to take because they were white, as she was. She never left the island, and none ventured there without her express invitation. Those who met her, met her veiled, almost invisible, in some dim sanctuary. Generally they did not need to dare such a thing, for her selected companions (the attendant called them specifically Lectorra, “Chosen”) could heal in her name, even the very sick.