‘Twenty paces,’ Tashor corrected mildly.
‘It was closer to thirty,’ she insisted.
‘Can you dance?’ the lean trapper with the scarred face asked.
She looked directly at him. ‘Only if you’re seriously interested in buying me,’ she replied.
‘We can talk about that after I see you dance,’ he said.
‘Can you hold a beat?’ she demanded.
‘I can.’
‘Very well.’ Her hands went to the chain about her waist, and it jingled as she unfastened it. She opened the heavy red dress, stepped out of it, and handed it to Tashor. Then she carefully untied the leash from about her neck and bound a ribbon of red silk about her head to hold back her wealth of lustrous, blue-black hair. Beneath the red felt dress, she wore a filmy rose-colored gown of Mallorean silk that whispered and clung to her as she moved. The silk gown reached to midcalf, and she wore soft leather boots on her feet. Protruding from the top of each boot was the jeweled hilt of a dagger, and a third dagger rode on the leather belt about her waist. Her gown was caught in a tight collar about her throat, but it left her arms bare to the shoulder. She wore a half-dozen narrow gold bracelets about each wrist. With a conscious grace, she bent and fastened a string of small bells to each ankle. Then she lifted her smoothly rounded arms until her hands were beside her face. ‘This is the beat, scar-face,’ she told the trapper. ‘Try to hold it.’ And she began to clap her hands together. The beat was three measured claps followed by four staccato ones. Vella began her dance slowly with a kind of insolent strut. Her gown whispered as she moved, its hem sighing about her lush calves.
The lean trapper took up her beat, his callused hands clapping together loudly in the sudden silence as Vella danced.
Garion began to blush. Vella’s movements were subtle and fluid. The bells at her ankles and the bracelets about her wrists played a tinkling counterpoint to the trapper’s beat. Her feet seemed almost to flicker in the intricate steps of her dance, and her arms wove patterns in the air. Other, even more interesting, things were going on inside the rose-colored, gossamer gown. Garion swallowed hard and discovered that he had almost stopped breathing.
Vella began to whirl, and her long black hair flared out, almost perfectly matching the flare of her gown. Then she slowed and once again dropped back into that proud, sensual strut that challenged every man in the room.
They cheered when she stopped, and she smiled a slow, mysterious little smile.
‘You dance very well,’ the scar-faced trapper observed in a neutral voice.
‘Naturally,’ she replied. ‘I do everything very well.’
‘Are you in love with anyone?’ The question was bluntly put.
‘No man has won my heart,’ Vella declared flatly. ‘I haven’t seen a man yet who was worthy of me.’
‘That may change,’ the trapper suggested. ‘One goldmark.’ It was a firm offer.
‘You’re not serious,’ she snorted. ‘Five goldmarks.’
‘One and a half,’ he countered.
‘This is just too insulting.’ Vella raised both hands up in the air, and her face took on a tragic expression. ‘Not a copper less than four.’
‘Two goldmarks,’ the trapper offered.
‘Unbelievable!’ she exclaimed, spreading both arms. ‘Why don’t you just cut my heart out and have done with it? I couldn’t consider anything less than three and a half.’
‘To save time, why don’t we just say three?’ He said it firmly. ‘With intention that the arrangement become permanent,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.
‘Permanent?’ Vella’s eyes widened.
‘I like you,’ he replied. ‘Well, what do you say?’
‘Stand up and let me have a look at you,’ she ordered him.
Slowly he unwound himself from the chair in which he had lounged. His tall body was as lean as his scarred face, and there was a hard-muscled quality about him. Vella pursed her lips and looked him over. ‘Not bad, is he?’ she murmured to Tashor.
‘You could do worse, Vella,’ her owner answered encouragingly.
‘I’ll consider your offer of three with intentions,’ Vella declared. ‘Have you got a name?’
‘Tekk,’ the tall trapper introduced himself with a slight bow.
‘Well then, Tekk,’ Vella told him, ‘don’t go away. Tashor and I need to talk over your offer.’ She gave him an almost shy look. ‘I think I like you, too,’ she added in a much less challenging tone. Then she took hold of the leash that was still wrapped around Tashor’s fist and led him out of the tavern, glancing back over her shoulder once or twice at the lean-faced Tekk.
‘That is a lot of woman,’ Silk murmured with a note of profound respect.
Garion found that he was able to breathe again, though his ears still felt very hot. ‘What did they mean by intention?’ he quietly asked Silk.
‘Tekk offered an arrangement that usually leads to marriage,’ Silk explained.
That baffled Garion. ‘I don’t understand at all,’ he confessed.
‘Just because someone owns her doesn’t give him any special rights to her person,’ Silk told him, ‘and those daggers of hers enforce that. One does not approach a Nadrak woman unless one’s tired of living. She makes that decision. The wedding customarily takes place after the birth of her first child.’
‘Why was she so interested in the price?’
‘Because she gets half,’ Silk shrugged.
‘She gets half of the money every time she’s sold?’ Garion was incredulous.
‘Of course. It’d hardly be fair otherwise, would it?’
The servingman who was bringing them three more cups of ale had stopped and was staring openly at Silk.
‘Is something wrong, friend?’ Silk asked him mildly.
The servingman lowered his eyes quickly. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I just thought – you reminded me of somebody, that’s all. Now that I see you closer, I realize that I was mistaken.’ He put down the cups quickly, turned, and left without picking up the coins Silk had laid on the table.
‘I think we’d better leave,’ Silk said quietly.
‘What’s the matter?’ Garion asked him.
‘He knows who I am – and there’s that reward notice that’s being circulated.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Belgarath agreed, rising to his feet.
‘He’s talking with those men over there,’ Garion said, watching the servingman, who was in urgent conversation with a group of hunters on the far side of the room and was casting frequent looks in their direction.
‘We’ve got about a half a minute to get outside,’ Silk said tensely. ‘Let’s go.’
The three of them moved quickly toward the door.
‘You there!’ someone behind them shouted. ‘Wait a minute!’
‘Run!’ Belgarath barked, and they bolted outside and hurled themselves into their saddles just as a half-dozen leather-garbed men burst out through the tavern door.
The shout, ‘Stop those men!’ went largely unheeded as they galloped off down the street. Trappers and hunters as a breed were seldom inclined to mix themselves in other men’s affairs, and Garion, Silk, and Belgarath had passed through the village and were splashing across a ford before any kind of pursuit could be organized.
Silk was swearing as they entered the forest on the far side of the river, spitting out oaths like melon seeds. His profanity was colorful and wide-ranging, reflecting on the birth, parentage, and uncleanly habits of not only those pursuing them, but of those responsible for circulating the reward notice as well.
Belgarath reined in sharply, raising his hand as he did. Silk and Garion hauled their horses to a stop. Silk continued to swear.
‘Do you suppose you could cut short your eloquence for a moment?’ Belgarath asked him. ‘I’m trying to listen.’
Silk muttered a few more choice oaths, then clamped his teeth shut. There were confused shouts far behind them and a certain amount of splashin
g.
‘They’re crossing the stream,’ Belgarath noted. ‘It looks as if they plan to take the business seriously. Seriously enough to chase us, at any rate.’
‘Won’t they give up when it gets dark?’ Garion asked.
‘These are Nadrak hunters,’ Silk said, sounding profoundly disgusted. ‘They’ll follow us for days – just for the enjoyment of the hunt.’
‘There’s not much we can do about that now,’ Belgarath grunted. ‘Let’s see if we can outrun them.’ And he thumped his heels to his horse.
It was midafternoon as they rode at a gallop through the sunlit forest. The undergrowth was scanty, and the tall, straight trunks of fir and pine rose like great columns toward the blue sky overhead. It was a good day for a ride, but not a good day for being chased. No day was good for that.
They topped a rise and stopped again to listen. ‘They seem to be falling behind,’ Garion noted hopefully.
‘That’s just the drunk ones,’ Silk disagreed sourly. ‘The ones who are serious about all this are probably much closer. You don’t shout when you’re hunting. See – look back there.’ He pointed.
Garion looked. There was a pale flicker back among the trees. A man on a white horse was riding in their direction, leaning far over in his saddle and looking intently at the ground as he rode.
‘If he’s any kind of tracker at all, it will take us a week to shake him off,’ Silk said disgustedly.
Somewhere, far off among the trees to their right, a wolf howled.
‘Let’s keep going,’ Belgarath told them.
They galloped on then, plunging down the far side of the rise, threading their way among the trees. The thud of their horses’ hoofs was a muffled drumming on the thick loam of the forest floor, and clots of half-decayed debris spattered out behind them as they fled.
‘We’re leaving a trail as wide as a house,’ Silk shouted to Belgarath.
‘That can’t be helped for now,’ the old man replied. ‘We need some more distance before we start playing games with the tracks.’
Another howl drifted mournfully through the forest, from the left this time. It seemed a bit closer than the first had been.
They rode on for another quarter of an hour and then they suddenly heard a great babble of confusion to the rear. Men were shouting with alarm, and horses squealed in panic. Garion could also hear savage growls. At Belgarath’s signal, they slowed their horses to listen. The terrified squeals of horses rang sharply through the trees, punctuated by their riders’ curses and frightened shouts. A chorus of howls rose from all around. The forest seemed suddenly full of wolves. The pursuit behind them disintegrated as the horses of the Nadrak reward hunters bolted with screams of sheer panic in all directions.
With a certain grim satisfaction, Belgarath listened to the fading sounds behind them. Then, his tongue lolling from his mouth, a huge, dark-furred wolf trotted out of the woods about thirty yards away, stopped, and dropped to his haunches, his yellow eyes gazing intently at them.
‘Keep a tight grip on your reins,’ Belgarath instructed quietly, stroking the neck of his suddenly wild-eyed mount.
The wolf did not say anything, but merely sat and watched.
Belgarath returned that steady gaze quite calmly, then finally nodded once in acknowledgment. The wolf rose, turned, and started off into the trees. He stopped once, glanced back over his shoulder at them, and raised his muzzle to lift the deep, bell-toned howl that summoned the other members of his pack to return to their interrupted hunt. Then, with a flicker he was gone, and only the echo of his howl remained.
Chapter Four
They rode east for the next several days, gradually descending into a broad, marshy valley where the undergrowth was denser and the air noticeably more humid. A brief summer shower rolled in one afternoon, accompanied by great, ripping crashes of thunder, a deluge of pounding rain, and winds that howled among the trees, bending and tossing them and tearing leaves and twigs from the underbrush to whirl and fly among the dark trunks. The storm soon passed, however, and the sun came out again. After that, the weather continued fair, and they made good time.
Garion felt a peculiar sense of incompleteness as he rode and he sometimes caught himself looking around for missing friends. The long journey in search of the Orb had established a sort of pattern in his mind, a sense of rightness and wrongness, and this trip felt wrong. Barak was not with them, for one thing, and the big, red-bearded Cherek’s absence made Garion feel oddly insecure. He also missed the hawk-faced, silent Hettar and the armored form of Mandorallen riding always at the front, with the silver-and-blue pennon snapping from the tip of his lance. He was painfully lonely for Durnik the smith and he even missed Ce’Nedra’s spiteful bickering. What had happened at Riva became less and less real to him, and all the elaborate ceremony that had attended his betrothal to the impossible little princess began to fade in his memory, like some half-forgotten dream.
It was one evening, however, after the horses had been picketed and supper was over and they had rolled themselves in their blankets to sleep, that Garion, staring into the dying embers of their fire, came at last to face the central vacancy that had entered his life. Aunt Pol was not with them, and he missed her terribly. Since childhood, he had felt that, so long as Aunt Pol was nearby, nothing could really go wrong that she could not fix. Her calm, steady presence had been the one thing to which he had always clung. As clearly as if she stood before him, Garion could see her face, her glorious eyes, and the white lock at her brow; the sudden loneliness for her was as sharp as the edge of a knife.
Everything felt wrong without her. Belgarath was here, certainly, and Garion was fairly sure that his grandfather could deal with any purely physical dangers, but there were other, less obvious perils that the old man either did not consider or chose to ignore. To whom could Garion turn when he was afraid, for example? Being afraid was not the sort of thing that endangered life or limb, but it was still an injury of sorts – and sometimes a deeper and more serious kind of injury. Aunt Pol had always been able to banish his fears, but now she was not here, and Garion was afraid and he could not even admit it. He sighed and pulled his blankets more closely about him and slowly drifted into a troubled sleep.
It was about noon some days later when they reached the east fork of the River Cordu, a broad, dirty brown flow running through a brushy valley in a generally southerly direction toward the capital at Yar Nadrak. The pale green, waist-high brush extended back several hundred yards from either bank of the river and was silt-smeared by the high waters of the spring runoff. The sultry air above the brush was alive with clouds of gnats and mosquitoes.
A sullen boatman ferried them across to the village standing on the far bank. As they led their horses off onto the ferry landing, Belgarath spoke quietly. ‘I think we’ll want to change direction here,’ he told them. ‘Let’s split up. I’ll go pick up supplies, and the two of you go find the town tavern. See if you can get some information about passes leading up through the north range into the lands of the Morindim. The sooner we get up there, the better. The Malloreans seem to be getting the upper hand here and they could clamp down without much warning. I don’t want to have to start explaining my every move to Mallorean Grolims – not to mention the fact that there’s a great deal of interest in Silk’s whereabouts just now.’
Silk rather glumly agreed. ‘I’d like to get that matter straightened out, but I don’t suppose we really have the time, do we?’
‘No, not really. The summer is very, very short up north, and the crossing to Mallorea is unpleasant, even in the best weather. When you get to the tavern, tell everybody that we want to try our luck in the gold fields of the north range. There’s bound to be somebody around who’ll want to show off his familiarity with trails and passes – particularly if you offer to buy him a few drinks.’
‘I thought you said you knew the way,’ Silk protested.
‘I know one way – but it’s a hundred leagues east of here. Let’
s see if there’s something a little closer. I’ll come by the tavern after I get the supplies.’ The old man mounted and went off up the dirt street, leading their packhorse behind him.
Silk and Garion had little trouble finding someone in the smelly tavern willing to talk about trails and passes. Quite to the contrary, their first question sparked a general debate.
‘That’s the long way around, Besher,’ one tipsy gold hunter interrupted another’s detailed description of a mountain pass. ‘You go left at the falls of the stream. It saves you three days.’
‘I’m telling this, Varn,’ Besher retorted testily, banging his fist down on the scarred table. ‘You can tell them about the way you go when I’m finished.’
‘It’ll take you all day – just like that trail you’re so fond of. They want to go look for gold, not admire scenery.’ Varn’s long, stubbled jaw thrust out belligerently.
‘Which way do we go when we get to the long meadow up on top?’ Silk asked quickly, trying to head off the hostilities.
‘You go right,’ Besher declared, glaring at Varn.
Varn thought about that as if looking for an excuse to disagree. Finally he reluctantly nodded. ‘Of course that’s the only way you can go,’ he added, ‘but once you get through the juniper grove, you turn left.’ He said it in the tone of a man anticipating contradiction.
‘Left?’ Besher objected loudly. ‘You’re a blockhead, Varn. You go right again.’
‘Watch who you’re calling a blockhead, you jackass!’
Without any further discussion, Besher punched Varn in the mouth, and the two of them began to pummel each other, reeling about and knocking over benches and tables.
‘They’re both wrong, of course,’ another miner sitting at a nearby table observed calmly, watching the fight with a clinical detachment. ‘You keep going straight after you get through the juniper grove.’
Several burly men, wearing loose-fitting red tunics over their polished mail shirts, had entered the tavern unnoticed during the altercation, and they stepped forward, grinning, to separate Varn and Besher as the two rolled around on the dirty floor. Garion felt Silk stiffen beside him. ‘Malloreans!’ the little man said softly.