Runestone of Eresu Read online

  The heavy rain lasted full three hours across the hills to the river Urobb and did not abate as they rode up the last steep rise to the settlement of Blackcob that lay overlooking the river—though one could not see or hear the river, only driving rain. It was near midnight. Not a light shone anywhere; Blackcob was still as death and the rain likely never to end. Ram found Rolf Klingen’s corral only after bruising his shins on some piled barrels and swearing a lot. The stranger followed him obediently, and it occurred to Ram as he unsaddled the gelding that he had not even asked the man’s name; and perhaps he was foolish to bring him here into Blackcob, which had already seen more trouble than it wanted. Yet still he trusted the man. He unsaddled the pack mare under the shed, rubbed the horses down and, because they bumped one another in the dark, knew the stranger did the same. He felt reluctant to ask a name not given. They found grain at last and buckets; and when the animals were cared for, they went to wake old Klingen. Ram badly wanted a mug of something hot, and some food. Knowing he must have the stranger’s name if they were to spend the night with Klingen, he shouted, “How are you called, stranger?” and got a mouthful of rain.

  “I am Anchorstar. And you, lad?”

  “Ram. You can call me Ram.”

  Ram felt the stranger pause in the downpour and stare, then come on again. “Ramad?” he cried, almost softly. “Ramad—Ramad of wolves, then?”

  “Yes, I am Ramad. But how . . .” Cold and wet and hungry, Ram spent but little time wondering how the old man had known his name when all else about Carriol seemed so confusing to him. When the old man made no answer, he put it out of his mind and rapped sharply at Klingen’s door, stood hunched under the overhang shivering, the wound in his side paining him abysmally after the long ride. What in Urdd was taking Klingen so long? He pounded again, felt Anchorstar stir beside him and push closer to the log wall. He pounded a third time, fit to break the door, then reached to lift the latch.

  FOUR

  Some five hours ride to the west of Blackcob it was raining equally hard. The town of Kubal showed no light, gone in sleep except for a young girl standing in the darkness of a corral, drenched with rain, weeping so violently her whole body shook with sobs; yet weeping in silence, choking back the wail of anguish that rose and twisted her. She dared not be heard crying in the night or she would be beaten and the winged horse she clung to would be beaten again too. The big mare stood hunched and strangely twisted; Telien had to reach to caress her warm, wet neck, caress carefully so as not to touch the bloody wounds. She had staunched some of the blood, though it was impossible to bandage the whip-cuts across the mare’s back and legs, impossible to bandage, without further hurting, her poor maimed wings: wings once marvels of light-flung beauty, now clipped to the skin like a barn fowl’s, naked and bony and deformed-looking, with a few ragged feathers clinging, and bloody where AgWurt had cut too close. Telien could not erase the picture of her lying tangled in AgWurt’s snare, there in the valley, bound down with ropes; the picture of AgWurt’s face as he lashed her again and again so Telien turned away, sick. “My own father! I would . . . I would kill him if I could!” Though she knew, ashamed, that she was too terrified of him to try.

  The mare reached around to nuzzle her in loving warmth. Telien hugged her gently, stood drenched by rain and felt only her warmth and her own sickness at what AgWurt had done.

  There was no roof to shelter the mare, and Telien could not get her out of the corral, for it was locked and AgWurt carried his keys, always, chained securely to his wrist. She could not bring herself to leave her alone in the dark and rain, had been here since AgWurt went to bed. Perhaps the sound of her voice would help somehow. She thought that a wild creature, injured so, would only want to die. She began to speak, very softly, putting all the love she had into the words; though the words she used meant little for they could not understand one another. Only one who was Seer-born could speak with the winged ones.

  “I used to come to watch you. No one knew I did. I came at night, or when they were all away raiding. I found the secret valley. You were the most beautiful of all, like a golden shaft of sun leaping in the sky and then winging to earth, then sweeping up again. I used to watch you drifting on the winds and then grazing in the deep grass, your wings spread out with the pure joy of being! Oh, it was lovely, you were lovely, you were like . . . You will be free again,” she said, her voice trembling. “Your wings will grow whole again, I promise. The muscles are not cut, he would not injure your wings, he wants . . .” She pressed her face against the mare. “I didn’t know. I never knew that AgWurt followed me! I would have died before I let him know!”

  The mare moved her nose, shifted her weight as if the pain had increased. “Maybe he followed me the night the darkness came over the valley. You saw it, all of you saw that darkness, you flew away at once. Was AgWurt behind me then, was that the noise I heard and thought was part of the cold dark thing in the sky? What was that dark? Like a great monster, all cloudy and boiling along the top of the hills. So fast, so silent and black. The feel of it, so coldly evil!” She shivered, remembering. “AgWurt must have come back later to set the snares. “I’m glad the others got away, but you . . .” she glanced at the mare’s swollen belly. “You could not. Your colt—I wanted—I wanted to kill AgWurt. I wanted to cut you free but . . .” Shame engulfed Telien again. “I wasn’t brave enough. I thought he would kill me instead, and that he would kill you too.” Her voice shook. “I couldn’t watch him beat you, I turned my face away.”

  For some time she was silent. She wished she had the power of Seeing so they could speak with one another. Sometimes, lying in the brush at the edge of the hidden valley, she had known just from their actions what the winged horses must be saying to one another with their silent, loving ways.

  AgWurt meant to break this winged horse’s will. He meant to subdue her until she was as nothing, make of her a tame, domestic animal submissive to him. He meant to do the same to her colt, to clip its wings and make it slave to him. He did not dream that that was impossible—to AgWurt nothing was impossible if he put enough force to it. Telien knew such a creature would die first, before she would be slave; that she would likely kill her colt rather than let AgWurt lay hands on it. AgWurt envisioned himself mounted on a winged horse of Eresu; he thought he would be like Ramad of the wolves then, like Jerthon of Carriol. An invincible warrior. AgWurt’s dreams sickened her. “I saw you with your stallion,” Telien said softly. “He is—he is like fire! Like flame in the sky!” To think of a winged colt born to the captivity of AgWurt’s heartbreaking treatment, earthbound and fenced, was unbearable. “I will get you away from him somehow—somehow I will!

  The mare shifted then and turned to look straight at her, lifting her head in pride, and Telien knew suddenly and with terrible joy that she did, indeed, understand her. She didn’t know how, without Seer’s skill to link them. She didn’t care how. The wonder of it made her tremble. She said softly, “Meheegan, Meheegan,” for the mare had given her her name. That sudden illuminating knowledge was like honey, like a song within Telien. “You will be free, Meheegan. I promise you will.” She knew she would kill AgWurt if she must and hoped she would be brave enough.

  *

  Ram pounded again, swearing. Klingen must sleep like a stone. He was chilled through, his temper gone, his wound painful from the long ride, his bandage soaked with rain or blood or both. Beside him Anchorstar was silent, lost in incredible patience. At last Ram lifted the latch and kicked Klingen’s door open, stepping back in case someone else was there. He had no taste for battling some errant band of Herebians in the middle of this cursed wet night.

  No candle flared. No voice rang out. He edged in at last, cautiously, felt Anchorstar behind him, found flint and a small taper under his leather cape and struck light.

  But the light showed nothing. There were no walls. He was not inside the cabin though the doorframe pressed hard and real against his arm. Anchorstar touched his shoulder, Ram fel
t the man’s fear. They faced not the homely cabin room but a void: inside the door vast space yawned, swallowing Ram’s light so the taper’s glow was only a useless pool lost at once in the emptiness. They had come through Klingen’s door, where Ram had come a hundred times—Ram knew a cot should stand just there, a cookfire there with a pot at the back—but he stood instead on the brink of empty blackness and felt Anchorstar draw his breath in fear. Incredible space loomed inside that door, empty space filled with a monstrous cold as if the world ended at their feet.

  A voice whispered out, barely discernible yet echoing, a cold voice calling to Ram from no direction and from all directions, and it did not speak in words but soothed him and enticed him; the emptiness soothed and reached around him, holding him as a woman would, so his pain and hunger were gone and he was warm and incredibly comforted. He forgot Anchorstar. He just had to step forward, be soothed—he froze suddenly with the sense of BroogArl all around him, the sense of HarThass himself risen from death to haunt him with the bones of living skeletons from his childhood agonies. Drawn forward against his will, he clung to the doorframe sick and shaken as BroogArl reached, enticed—BroogArl would fling him into the endless dark, and Ram could not resist . . . He spun away from the door, jerked back into the rain, stumbled terrified into the welcome drenching.

  He stood shaken and weak, clinging to Anchorstar, and felt hands on his shoulders then guiding him into the hut where a welcome fire blazed.

  Anchorstar pushed him into a chair, and old Klingen held his arm as though he might fall. The kettle was boiling, the hut warm and homey. Klingen stared at him puzzled, his brown seamed face and brown hair hardly distinguishable from the rough wood walls of the hut, as if part of the hut itself had come alive to produce the old man, brown wrinkled skin, brown rough nightshirt like bark, even his voice creaking like too-dry wood.

  “Iee, Ram, you give me a scare! What was you two doing standing there staring in at me like you’d seen a living ghost and me having to ask you five times to come in before you ever so much as heard me! Come, off with those clothes, both of you, and get yourselves up to the fire.” Klingen turned and began to stir up a pot hanging at the side of the fire, then reached an earthen jug from the shelf and poured out generous lacings into mugs, poured in hot water from the kettle. “Here, you two, this’ll take the chill off’n ya.”

  Ram drank the hot liquor so greedily it burned all the way down.

  “There, lad, take off the bandages too—I’ll rout out some clean rags.” Then, staring as Ram undid the bandages, “Sure you took one right in the liver near, didn’t you.” Ram was relieved to see that all the wetness was no more than rain, that no blood oozed. Anchorstar sat quietly at the table wrapped in something shapeless of Klingen’s, watching them both with a puzzled look; a tall thin man he was, with hair white as loess dust and eyes—Ram stared. He had never seen yellow eyes in a man. In a goat, perhaps, in a wild creature. The wolves had yellow eyes. But never yellow eyes in a man, eyes completely strange under that shock of white hair. And in spite of his quiet repose, he seemed ill at ease in a way, as if this world of log hut and friendly fire were almost foreign to him.

  As Klingen stirred the pot, a fine aroma filled the hut, and soon enough the old man set bowls of steaming stew before them rich with gravy, and new bread, and refilled their mugs with the strong honeyrot and hot water, very little of the latter so that soon a fine maze filled Ram’s mind and, with full stomach, he wanted only sleep. But the two older men had set to talking, and Ram could not close his eyes for the strangeness of the conversation as Klingen tried to winnow out Anchorstar’s identity as a mouse would winnow out grain from sealed stores. Where had Anchorstar come from, and why? Anchorstar, at first reluctant, began at last to speak of the far mountains and of lands where none of Ere had ever ventured, to speak of the old mythical animals that still existed there, of the triebuck and the great dragoncats; and of the gantroed, which Ram knew well from the time on Tala-charen. He spoke of wonders Ram had only dreamed, but he did not speak of when he had gone into the far lands, of how many years ago, or from whence he came. When he rose at last to open his pack, he took from it a small leather pouch and spilled out across the table a cluster of shimmering jewels. Ram and Klingen stared. Never had Ram seen such, stones, deep amber, filled with light. Ram held one before the fire and its colors flashed as if it had absorbed the fire, and from its center a gleaming star shone out.

  “How are they called?” Klingen asked, drawing in his breath.

  “They are starfires; they are said to bring luck, though I cannot vouch for that. They are said by some to bring . . .” He paused, stared at Ram with that deep, yellow-eyed look that Ram could not plumb. “They are said to give to man a lightness of spirit, a lightness of being that will—that can do magical things. Though not,” he added, “not like the runestone of Eresu.”

  “You know of the runestone?”

  “Many in Ere knew of the runestone long before I—before I touched the unknown lands. I know of Tala-charen and of the splitting of the stone.” Anchorstar leaned back and touched his empty bowl lightly, then pushed it aside. “I know that Ramad of—Ramad of wolves is . . . He paused for a long moment, studying Ram, “is of great importance to Ere, to what—to what will happen in Ere.”

  Ram searched his face, could not discern his exact meaning. Whether of hidden sarcasm—though he thought not—or of prophecy; or of something else far more certain. Anchorstar’s steady eyes seemed very certain.

  “With the whole runestone,” Ram said, “perhaps I might be of importance to Ere. Perhaps. But the runestone is destroyed. Only a shard remains.”

  A shift in the light of Anchorstar’s eyes might have been only the dance of firelight. “You are—one dedicated to the good, Ramad of wolves. Whatever comes to your hand will be used to the good of Ere. And if the runestone—the whole stone . . .” But he did not finish, turned away almost as if in sorrow, and sat gazing into Klingen’s fire.

  At last Ram stirred and spoke. “And you, Anchorstar. What are you dedicated to?” For this tall white-haired man, whose look Ram could not fathom, was more than a traveler, more than a wanderer upon Ere. There was a dedication in him, a purpose in him strong as steel.

  Anchorstar turned back to look at him. “A trader, Ramad. I am a trader.” He held up one of the amber stones. “What I traded for these stones was little. What I will trade them for could—could be much.”

  *

  In the cold dawn, with the rain abated but the sky dull gray, Blackcob looked forlorn indeed. The Kubalese attack had left burned huts and sheds, burned fences, grain stores scattered uselessly where the side of a shed had been broken away, very few horses in the corrals, and they the dregs of the lot. Ram found Anchorstar out well before him tending to his mount, and that mount made Ram stare with wonder. He had had no glimpse of him last night as they rubbed down and fed their horses in darkness. A tall, beautifully made stallion, dun in color, as steel gray as the morning sky.

  Never had there been such a horse in Ere, such a magnificent, long-legged, short-coupled stallion; he was exactly what Ram and Jerthon had dreamed of, the fine wide eyes, the strong light bones—he could have been a product of their own breeding program many years hence. This dun stallion was not of Ere, never. Had Anchorstar found him somewhere beyond the far mountains; were there men there to breed such as this?

  And when he questioned Anchorstar, Anchorstar’s confusion made him press his querying obstinately. Did the horse come from Moramia or Karra, or from somewhere on the high desert where the secretive tribes dwelt? Anchorstar would not say. Did he come from the far lands? Were there men there so skilled at the breeding of horses?

  “He comes,” Anchorstar said at last, “from very far. Farther than you imagine.” Again there was the sadness, like a darkened cloak swirling around Anchorstar. “Yet this stallion is closer to you, Ramad, than you know.”

  “And will you sell him to me, then? He would be the finest b
lood in our breeding, he . . .

  “I know, Ramad of wolves, what he would do. But I cannot sell him. I cannot part with him in—I cannot part with him now.” Anchorstar would say no more, Ram could not get him to speak further of the stallion and gave it up at last.

  They rode out of Blackcob together after Klingen’s huge breakfast, Anchorstar huddled in his cape but sitting his mount lightly, hardly needing to touch the reins.

  Ram’s wound, freshly bound, did not pain him now. He had slept dreamless and deep, warmed by Klingen’s fire without and by Klingen’s numerous cups of hot honeyrot within, lulled by old Klingen’s snoring like wild hogs rattling—Anchorstar had snored not at all. Ram did not lead the pack mare now, had left her for the men of Blackcob. They would need every mount they could get to make the ride into Kubal two days hence.

  He parted from Anchorstar at the forking of the rivers Urobb and Voda Cul. Ram headed up the eastern shore of the Urobb toward the dark mountains, on toward the valley of the gods, keeping well away from Kubalese eyes. Anchorstar rode direct for Kubal, against both Ram’s and Klingen’s advice.

  “They will kill you for the stallion, if nothing else. And those stones; if the Kubalese see the starfires . . .”

  “I must take my chances. I would—I would see this Kubal that has risen on the hills.”

  He would say no more. Ram stared after him puzzling. He rode at a gallop toward the low, western hills, his white hair like a flag on the morning.

  Surely he did not travel to Kubal merely from curiosity. Klingen had described the Kubalese raids adequately, described their brutality with sufficient clarity to belay any idle curiosity a man might have.

  Ram forded the Voda Cul at the shallows, then veered north of the Urobb, farther from Kubal’s prying eyes. He took his noon meal from the saddle while his gelding drank, and soon was among high foothills and narrow valleys where the rich grass was crossed by small wandering springs. The dark humping mountains rose directly over him, gigantic peaks laid about by deep shadow and blackened by falls of volcanic stone, empty wild mountains peopled only by the wolves and, here and there, by the winged horses transient as moths on the wind. There were caves in the mountains, immense and twilit and filled with the wonders of a time long past. Ram thought of the caves he knew, and longed for the warmth of shaggy muzzles thrust deep into his hands, for the rank musty smell and the deep voices of the wolves, for Fawdref’s knowing grin. He slipped the wolf bell from inside his tunic and held it for a long painful time, staring at the rearing bitch wolf holding the bell in her mouth, remembering. Remembering so much. Fear, terror. Such warmth, opening his mind to wonders he had not dreamed. The sense of brotherhood, greeting the great wolves and knowing, always, that he had come home. He longed to go to them. But he could not pause nor turn aside, he must go quickly into Eresu lest, while he tarried, another child should burn at Venniver’s abominable sacrifice. He pushed the bay gelding restlessly toward the dark peaks where lay the hidden valley. Soon he would stand facing the gods, their bodies glinting and ever changing as if they moved in another element. He went weak with awe and with apprehension. Could a man approach the gods? His appalling effrontery at considering he could do so, could solicit the gods’ help, nearly undid him.