Then she knew she could not. She simply could not trust Allira that much. Her sister would not intentionally betray her; but if Brynat suspected Allira knew, he would try anything to extract the information from her. She had no faith in Allira’s ability to resist questioning for any length of time.
As she went downward, she realized that the slope of the tunnel was lessening, until she walked on a grade that was just downhill. She must be coming near the end of the long stair. She was a fair judge of distances, and she knew that she had walked a considerable distance in the night; the tunnel must have led far beneath the castle and down into the caves and cliffs beneath. Then she came upon a great pair of bronze doors, thrust them outward, and stood in the open air, free.
It was still dark, although the smell of the air told her that dawn was less than two hours away. The moons had set, and the rain had stopped, though mist still lay along the ground. She looked back at the closed doors behind her.
She knew where she was now. She had seen these doors from the outside when as a child she played in the forge village. She stood now in an open square of stone, surrounded on every side by the doors cut in the cliffs that rose around her. The sky was only a narrow cut above. She looked at the dark house doors, some of them still agape, and thought with all the longing in her weary body of how good it would be to crawl into one of the abandoned houses to lie down and sleep for hours.
She forced herself upright again and went down the path that led between the cliffs. Like the tunnel, the empty forge village would be the first place searched if Brynat managed to force the secret of the passage from Allira. She passed the open-air hearths where countless years ago, smiths had worked, making their beautiful and curious ironwork, copper jewelry and the iron gates of their own castle now crumpled and thrown down in the siege. She cast a look upward. From here she could see a portion of the outworks. Brynat had spared no time in repairing the fortifications of Storn. Evidently he thought he might have to hold them against invaders.
He will. I swear it by Avarra and Zandru, I swear it by Sharra, Goddess of Forges and Fires! He shall struggle tenfold…
There was no time for that. If she wanted to make Brynat suffer, there was only one way to achieve it, she must get away herself. Her own safety must be the first thought. She passed the old circle of fireplaces, cold and rusted. Even the carven image of Sharra above the central forge was dulled and the gold of her chains, set against the duller metal of the statue, covered with spiderwebs and bird-droppings. She flinched at the sacrilege. She was no worshipper of the Flamehair, but like every child of the mountains, she had a deep respect and awe for the secret arts of the smith.
If I come back—when I come back Sharra’s image shall be purified and served again…
There was no time for that now, either.
The horizon was reddening perceptibly when footsore Melitta, her steps dragging, clung to the doorway of a small house in a village far below the castle, and beat weakly on it. She felt at her last strength. If no one heard her or helped her, she would fall down here and lie there until Brynat’s men found her, or she died.
But it was not more than a few moments until the door opened a cautious crack, and then motherly arms grasped her and drew her inside and to a fire.
“Quick—bar the door, draw the curtain— damisela, where did you come from? We thought you dead in the siege, or worse! How did you get free? Evanda guard us! Your poor hands, your face— Reuel, you oaf, bring some wine, quickly, for our little lady.”
A few minutes later, drinking hot soup, her boots drawn off and her feet to the fire, wrapped in blankets, Melitta was telling a little of her escape to a wide-eyed audience.
“Lady, you must hide here until the search is quiet—” but their faces were apprehensive, and Melitta said a swift “No. Brynat would surely kill you all,” and saw shamed relief in their eyes. “I can lie hidden in the caves up the mountain until darkness tonight; then I can get away to Nevarsin or beyond. But you can find me food to carry, and perhaps a horse that can face the passes.”
It was quickly arranged and by the time the day broke, Melitta rested, wrapped in furs and rugs in the labyrinthine caves which had for centuries been a last hiding place of the Storns. For one day she was safe there, since Brynat would surely search nearer places first; and by tonight she would be gone. It was a long road to Carthon.
Exhausted, the girl slept, but the name tolled in her dreams—Carthon.
* * *
VII
« ^ »
BARRON had believed, on the journey from the Terran Zone to Armida, that he had seen mountains. True, his Darkovan escort had repeatedly called them foothills, but he had put that down to exaggeration, to the desire to see the stranger’s surprise. Now, half a day’s ride from Armida, he began to see that they had not exaggerated. As they came out of a miles-long, sloping pathway along a forested hill, he saw, lying before him, the real ranges. Cool purple, deep violet, pale grayed blue, they lay there fold on fold and height behind height, each successive fold rising higher and farther away, until they vanished in cloudy distances that might have been thunderheads—or further ranges.
“Good God,” he exploded, “we’re not going over the top of those, are we?”
“Not quite,” Colryn, riding at his side, reassured him. “Only to the peak of the second range, there.” He pointed. “The fire tower is on the crest of that range.” He told Barron its name in Darkovan. “But if you look far enough, you can see all the way back into the mountains, as far as the range they call the Wall Around the World. Nobody lives beyond there, except the trailmen.”
Barron remembered vague stories of various groups of Darkovan nonhumans. The next time they paused to eat cold food from their saddlebags and rest the horses, he looked for Lerrys, who was still the friendliest of the three, and asked him about them. “Are they only beyond the far ranges? Or are there nonhumans in these mountains too?”
“Oh, yes. You’ve been on Darkover how long, five of our years, and you still haven’t seen any of our nonhumans?”
“One or two kyrii in the Terran Trade Zone—from a distance,” Barron told him, “and the little furred people at Armida—I don’t know what you call them. Are there others? And are they all—well, if they’re nonhumans, I can’t ask, ‘are they human,’ but do they meet Empire standards for so-called intelligent beings—time-binding culture, viable language capable of transfer to other I.B.’s?”
“Oh, they’re all I.B.’s by Terran Empire standards,” Lerrys assured him. “The reason the Empire doesn’t deal with them is fairly simple. Humans here don’t have much interest in the Empire per se, but they are interested in other humans as individuals. The nonhuman races—I’m no expert on them, but I suspect they have never tried to get in touch with the Empire for the same reason they don’t have much contact with humans on Darkover. Their goals and wishes and so forth are so completely different that there’s no point of contact; they don’t want any and they don’t have any.”
“You mean even Darkovans have no contact with nonhumans?”
“I wouldn’t say no contact. There’s some small amount of trade with the trailmen—they’re what you might call half-human or subhuman, and they live in the trees in the forests. They trade with the mountain people for drugs, small tools, metal and the like. They’re harmless enough unless you frighten them. The catmen—they’re a race something like the cralmacs, the furred servants at Armida. Cralmacs aren’t very intelligent; feline rather than simian, but they do have culture of a sort, and some of them are telepathic. Their level is about that of a moron, or a chimpanzee who suddenly acquired a tribal culture. A genius among the cralmacs might learn a dozen words of a human language but I never heard of one learning to read; I suspect the Empire people gave them pretty wide benefit of the doubt in classifying them as I.B.’s.”
“We tend to do that. We don’t want later squawks that we treated a potential intelligent race as higher animals.”
“I know. Cralmacs are listed as real or potential I.B.’s and let alone. The catmen, I suspect, are a hell of a lot more intelligent; I know they use metal tools. Fortunately I’ve never been close to them; they hate men and they’ll attack when they feel safe in doing it. I’ve heard that they have a very elaborate feudal culture with the most incredible tangle of codes governing face-saving behavior. The Dry-towners believe that some of the elements of their own culture came from cultural interchange with the catmen millennia ago, but an I.B. xenthropologist could tell you more about that.”
“Just how many races of I.B.’s are there on Darkover anyway?” Barron asked.
“God only knows, and I’m not being funny. Certainly no Terran knows. Maybe a few of the Comyn know, but they’re not telling. Or the chieri; they’re another of the nearly human races, but they’re as far above humans, most people think, as the cralmacs are below ’em. It’s for sure no Terran knows, though; and I’ve had more opportunity than most.”
Barron hardly heard the last sentence for a minute, in his interest in the nonhumans, then suddenly it penetrated. “You’re a Terran?”
“At your service. My name is Larry Montray; they call me Lerrys because it’s easier for a Darkovan to pronounce, that’s all.”
Barron felt suddenly angry and irked. “And you let me make a fool of myself trying to speak Darkovan to you?”
“I offered to interpret,” Larry said. “At the time I was under a pledge to Valdir, never to mention that I was a Terran—not to anyone.”
“And you’re his ward? His foster son? How’d that happen?”
“It’s a long story,” Larry said. “Some other time, maybe. In brief, his son, Kennard, is being schooled on Terra with my family, and I’m living here with his people.” He scrambled to his feet. “Look, Gwynn’s looking for us; I think we ought to get on. We want to reach the fire tower before nightfall tomorrow, if we can—the rangers there are due to be relieved—and it’s still a long way into those hills.”
It gave Barron plenty to think about, as they rode on, but his thoughts kept coming back, with an insistence he could not understand—it was as if some secret watcher, far back in his mind, kept dwelling on that point almost with frenzy.
A Terran could pass as a Darkovan. A Terran could pass as a Darkovan. A Darkovan could pass himself off as a Terran. A Terran could pass as a Darkovan. In these mountains, where Terrans are never seen, a Terran willing to pass as a Darkovan would be safe from anything human, and attract no unusual attention from nonhumans…
Barron shook his head. That’s enough of that. He wasn’t interested in the Darkovan mountains except from the viewpoint of doing his job well enough to redeem himself with the Empire, and get his own job, or something like it, back, and start over again on another planet, in a spaceport job. If Larry, or Lerrys, or whatever he calls himself, wants to amuse himself living with a family of weird, Darkovan telepaths and learning more than anyone else cared to know about nonhuman and such, that’s his business; everybody gets their kicks in his own way and I’ve known some dillies. But he wasn’t having any.
He clung to that with an uneasy concentration all that day, doggedly ignoring the beauty of the flowers that lined the mountain road, snubbing Larry’s friendly attempts to pick up the conversation. Toward evening, as the ride steepened. Colryn whiled away the time by singing Darkovan legends in a tuneful bass voice, but Barron shut his ears and would not listen, closing his eyes and letting his horse take the road along the mountain trail; the horse knew more about it than he did.
The sound of hoofs, the slow jogging in the saddle, the darkness behind his closed eyes, was first hypnotic, then strangely familiar; it seemed normal to sit unseeing in his saddle, trusting himself to the horse beneath him and his other senses alert—the smell of flowers, or conifers, of the dust of the road, the sharp scent of some civet-smelling animal in the brush. When Lerrys drew abreast of him, Barron kept his eyes closed and after a time Lerrys spurred his horse and overtook Colryn. Colryn went on singing in an undertone. Without knowing how he knew, Barron recognized that the singer had shifted to the opening bars of the long Ballad of Cassilda.
How strange it sounded without the water-harp accompaniment. Allira played and sang it well, though it was really a song for a man’s voice:
The stars were mirrored on the shore,
Dark was the dark enchanted moor,
Silent as cloud or wave or stone,
Robardin’s daughter walked alone.
A web of gold between her hands
On shining spindle burning bright,
Deserted lay the mortal lands
When Hastur left the realms of light.
Then, singing like a hidden bird…
He lost track of the words, hearing a far-off hawk-cry and the small wounded scream of some animal in the bush. He was here, he was free, and behind him, ruin and death.
The song went on, soft and incessant;
… A hand to each, he faltering came
Within the hidden mountain hall
Where Alar tends the darkened flame
That brightened at Cassilda’s call…
And as his brilliance paled away
Into the dimmer mortal day,
Cassilda left the shining loom.
A starflower in his hand she laid;
Then on him fell a mortal doom:
He rose and kissed Robardin’s maid.
The golden webs unwoven lay…
His mind spun in a strange dream as he listened to the song of the love of Cassilda, the sorrows of Camilla, the love of Hastur and the treachery of Alar. It must be strange to be Comyn and Hastur, and know oneself sib to the God…
I could use a god or two for kinsmen now!
What are these old gods really? The forge people used to say that Sharra came to their fires—and they didn’t mean the spirit of fire, either! The old telepaths could raise powers as far beyond my bird forms, or the fire shields, as these are beyond a trailman’s knife!
“Barron! Don’t fall asleep here, man; the trail gets dangerous!” The voice of Gwynn, the big Darkovan, broke into his dream, and Barron shook himself awake. Was it another hallucination?— No, only a dream. “I must have been asleep,” he said, rubbing his eyes. Gwynn chuckled. “And to think that five days ago you’d never been in the saddle. You learn fast, stranger. Congratulations! But you’d better keep your eyes open from here; the path gets rough and narrow, and you probably have better judgment than your horse—even though there is an old proverb that says, ‘on an uphill road give your horse his head.’ But if you fell here—” He gestured at the thousand-foot drop on either side of the pass. “We ought to try and get through and down into the valleys, before nightfall. There are Ya-men around these heights, and perhaps banshees; and although there’s no sign of the Ghost Wind, I’m not any too eager to meet them just the same.”
Barron started to ask what they were and stopped himself. Damn it, I don’t care; I’m already too entangled in this business, and Gwynn and the others are here to guard me. There was no reason he should think about these supposed dangers or even know what they were.
Nevertheless, the unease of the others penetrated to him, and he found himself pulling close to them in the narrow neck of the pass. It was almost an anti-climax when they topped the pass without incident and began to ride downward.
They camped that night in the valley under a shelter of the gray-blue boughs, which smelled of spice and rain; there was less talk and singing than usual. Barron, lying awake in his blankets and listening to the nightly rain sliding off the thick boughs, felt an apprehension he could not check. What a hell of a world, and why did I have to get stuck in it?
Already he had half forgotten the delight and fascination he had felt during the first journey through the foothills. It was part of that strangeness within which he wanted to forget.
They arrived at the ranger station late the next day; Barron, unpacking his crates by lamplight in th
e large, airy room allotted to him, realized grudgingly that at least Valdir had spared no pains to make a guest comfortable. There were ample shelves and cupboards for his working tools, benches and space with good light—the pressure lamps produced unusual amounts of light from the relatively crude fuels extracted from resins and oils of the local trees. A broad window of clear glass—not common on Darkover, not much desired, and evidently provided for the comfort of the Terran guest—provided an unbelievable panoramic view of mountains, and ridge after ridge of forested and rocky slopes and heights. As Barron stood at the window, watching the huge red sun of Darkover setting behind the peak—the mountains here were so high that the sun was hidden even before the night’s mist formed—he was touched again with that uncanny sense which made his heart race; but by sheer force of will he kept himself from succumbing to it, and went out to explore the station.
From where it sat at the top of one of the tallest peaks, it commanded a view—even without climbing to the tower behind—of what seemed like hundreds of square miles of forested country; Barron counted fifteen small villages, each lying sheltered in a fold of the hills, each only a cluster of dim roofs. At this distance he could see why telescopes would be needed; the view stretched so far that it vanished in haze through which no unaided eye could penetrate and which could easily hide a thin coil of smoke. He could even see the faraway roofs of Armida, and, high in the hills, a dim pale spire which looked like a castle.
“With your lenses,” Larry told him, joining him at the doorway of the station, “we will see forest fires while they are still only small blazes, and save our timber. Look.” He pointed to the side of a faraway ridge which was a black scar in the green. “That burned five years ago; it was out of control only for a day or two, but even though every man from seven villages turned out, we lost I forget how many square miles of good timber and resin trees. Also, from here, we could see and give the warning, if bandits or something attacked.”