Red Country (27 page)

Zam was stretched face down across its center, arms outspread, body straight, laid down among the morrethans so carefully he had not crushed a single flower. He was still warm. But I could not find so much as the echo of a pulse.

* * * * * *

What I did first I cannot remember. Beat my breast, perhaps, tore my hair, all the classic acts of grief. Certainly I ripped out every morrethan in armslength, for they were there next day, shredded to bits. Nothing answered, nothing stirred. Hethria's panorama lay out under the moonlight, tranquil, indifferent; and now its silence was the silence of a tomb.

When I looked at Zam again the moon had come round to light his face, and it wore the impassivity of the dead, so different from the impassivity of life, which is the mask of the active, conscious mind. Thinking that, I remembered his mind which had been so intricate, so accomplished, so full of living power, and that brought a blast of rage, the rage against destruction I had felt at the fall of the Gebros, the breaking of the dam. But now its intensity took me clean out of myself so that before I knew it I had stood up and screamed.

I did it with the full force of my lungs and the whole weight of the fury's impetus, with such force it tore my throat and seemed to disembowel the night. The echoes plunged against the pocket walls and ricocheted out over the desert to infinity, at any other time I would have been terrified. But there was no room for terror. I had found a purpose for the rage that was consuming me, and I did not utter empty sound, I screamed a name.

Before the echoes died I did it again, and again, and again, and each scream fed the fury rather than slaking it, gifting me with superhuman strength. I could have gone on forever, tearing the night to shreds with the manic will of a child in a tantrum, and like a child in a tantrum I found a vicious pleasure in the act. But I knew what I was doing. I had felt the quality of that silence deride my tantrums before, tolerantly waiting for them to blow themselves out. See, I challenged it, if you can tolerate this.

By moonlight it was even less perceptible than by day. There was no eddy in the air, no warning turbulence. Just one moment, the moonlight. And the next Fengthira, a phantom's paradigm, standing by her grave.

I stopped screaming, and with perfect composure waited to regain my breath. When she spoke I shook all over, but mostly it was at the strangeness, for the speech of the dead has still less resemblance than mindspeech to that of the tongue. It is flat, inflectionless, blocks of pure meaning printed directly into your brain.

I write it as I decoded it.

“Him,” I said, and pointed at Zam. “I want him back.”

Nor does expression play on the faces of the dead. Nevertheless, she conveyed puzzlement.

I said, “You taught him. He followed your rules. I want him back.”

This time the effect was sadness.

“Oh, yes, there is. Did you—do you—follow Math?”

“You know what I mean!”

“You taught it to him. It's because he believed you that he did this instead of fighting like any sensible man. He's gone now, because of it. I want him back.”

“Bah! If I can't reverse reality, what are you doing here?”

I caught a hint of amusement, dry, remote.

“I don't give a broken fiel if I'm pert or on your grave or chopping logic or standing on my head. I want him back.”

“So don't feed me any moonshine about tampering with reality. You were responsible. You give him back.”

“You told him about Math, and he believed you, and tried to abide by it. So he wouldn't let Hethria be ruined, and he tried to save it without bloodshed, because Math says killing is also destruction of reality, and that's Ammath. So he tried to save reality both ways and that's how he made this stupid bargain and destroyed himself. And if that's Math, then anyone who follows it is just what I thought he was—a barking lunatic!”

The moonlight flicked. Another shape was beside her at the grave foot. The moon leached the coppery hair, the violent green eyes, but I recognized the toss of that backflung mane, the thin, aquiline, volcanic face. In the speech of the Dead this voice retained expression. Harsh, vitriolic, perilous.

My heart quailed. Then I set my teeth. I must fight, I thought. If I have only a tongue and a temper, that's what I'll use.

“Who are you,” I flashed back, “to say I can't?”

The laughter was recognizable too. Harsh and deadly as the voice.

My breath came so sharply I all but choked. With just such a wild plunge of the heart have I recognized a flaw, a culpable flaw, in an opponent's deployment at chess.

“Good,” I said. “You can defend it then.”

It would have been thunder, in a mortal voice.

“Math,” I said. The rage filled me, buoyed me, made a razor of my wits. “It means Good, doesn't it? Then tell me this. How can what's defined as good cause its followers to avoid evil, respect reality, spare their enemies—and destroy themselves?”

Silence. Then,

“Oh, it was surely a bargain! But is it Math?”

Silence again.

“That's Good, is it? The best you could dream up for Good is something that saves its enemies and sees its servants dead?”

More silence.

“Answer me! Is it Math, or not?”

Still silence.

“Either it is, or it isn't. And if it isn't, I want him back!”

“What?”

It was Th'Iahn who—spoke. I got out one word before I gagged on the shock.

the dead voice lashed over me, like a flail of thorny vine.

“I didn't! You horrible blood-sucker—!”

It came in a falsetto that scraped my teeth.

“It wouldn't! It would have been overrun and destroyed and—”

He whirled his arm as if he swung a whip. this?
>

He swung his arm again. As if my eyes swung with it Eskan Helken revolved around me in the moonlight, towers and walls and bastions of silent, rose-black, impregnable, everlasting rock.

The fire died in my mouth. My own memories crashed down on me while I stared at him like a dumbstruck sheep. Eskan Helken in the evening light, Zam staring up at it, peace, regained serenity, in his face. Eskan Helken reeling in the noonday haze, and my own thoughts telling me,
those towers will outlast you, as they outlasted the dam, as they will probably outlast all humanity's puny works. If Kastir ruins all Hethria he won't be able to alter them.

“B-but—”

It came out a strangled sheep's cough, and the shade moved with it as if I had slipped a leash.

should
have thought! Should have rubbed two ideas together and let the fool soldiers go!>

“But Hethria—it isn't just Eskan Helken, it's the whole land, it's—”

He lunged across the grave. you
made him deny Math!>

I staggered back, one step, two, in another he would be at my throat and I had no defense—and in my panic I shouted like a child a last instinctive excuse. “
I
don't follow Math!”

Then I stumbled another step and tried to get my hands up in vain reflex to protect my throat.

And the shade brought up like a dog back on the leash.

I stood gasping as if I had run and he might have gasped too if he had breath. But every second he did not fly at me was a breathing-space for more than air. It gave me time to think. To understand what I had done. To rally my wits.

When it worked, my voice came out the merest husk. I said, “I did what
I
thought—was a Must.”

Fengthira was silent. But my spine shrank all but double under Th'Iahn's glare.

“I tried to protect Hethria. I tried to get him to protect it, yes. And by my laws—I wasn't wrong.”

Fengthira's shade shifted, slightly as a shadow never touched by wind.

“But you—
you
follow Math.”

Neither of them moved, but the air seemed to leap and tingle as if lightning ran between us and the strike almost stopped my heart.

“So never mind what I did. Let's consider what
you
did. You're Asthyn, and you took the bargain—he called you to hunt souls, and you came! And you took him as the price! You tell me what's Good about that!”

The moonlight had curdled round us. There was a flicker, like heat-haze, like fire-haze, in my sight. But no words came into my head.

“He followed your laws,” I shouted. “That's what killed him. Now explain to me why you, who invented the thing, and you, who passed it on to him, and both of you, who took advantage of it when he broke the rules and fed you—
fed
you—now you won't follow the laws yourselves!”

Silence again.

“It's really quite simple, isn't it?” Suddenly, as for the last grapple in a chess match, the heart was bursting in my throat. “It's nothing to do with me. Either
you
follow Math, or you don't. If you don't, you're hypocrites and your Math is a lie. If you do, this isn't Math and you can't go on with it. Not without condemning yourselves. It's your principle, not mine. So just tell me—do you follow Math?”

Silence yet again, lengthening, lengthening. I stood with my head up, trying to appear defiant, feeling the exaltation dwindle to terror, to despair. I had staked everything on a phantasm, and even among phantoms it was impotent. I had lost.

Slowly, slowly, the shape of Fengthira began to move, coming forward along the side of the grave. I turned as she advanced, so we ended still facing each other, she at Zam's head, I at his feet. For a moment her form wavered forward as if she would have touched him, and could not.

The message came slowly, however absent the rhythms of speech.

She paused. The breath quivered like a fountain-top in my throat.

she said.

The moonlight whirled so I dug the nails into my palms to steady it. Dimly, I saw Th'Iahn's shadow come to her side.

said that harsh voice, He paused.

There was such cold, threatful potency in that voice now, my heart shrank in my breast.

My heart was pounding so wildly it seemed to shake me on my feet. Fengthira's words rode above my ears' inner roar.

Her presence weakened, and revived.

Now there was irony, cold, inhuman, freezing my blood.

The irony deepened.

Beside her Th'Iahn growled, the growl of a beast scenting blood.

My knees shook. I said, “I'm—sorry I was—rude. But—I wanted him back.”

In death itself she could sound tart.

Her shape faded, those arrogant facial planes melting back into the moon. Beside her, Th'Iahn's voice spoke a phrase I had heard Zam use, and thought a kind of oath. Now it was a command, delivered unwillingly, with the elemental heat of his frustration showing through.

He said,

Then they were both dissolving, grown transparent, dislimning, gone. The moonlight was only light. Down the hill a saeveryr, roused by some shifting beam, churred drowsily and stopped. And between my hands, flesh and blood, warm, tangible, living reality, Zam stirred and groaned.