Wall of Shiuan

Jhirun did not let go his hand as they set out again upon the road; in time he grew weary of that and slipped his arm about her, aiding her steps, seeking by that human contact to keep his thoughts at bay.

Jhirun seemed content in that, saying nothing, holding her own mind private; but there was a difference now in the look she cast up at him—hope, he realized with a pang of guilt, hope that he had lent her. She looked up at him often, and sometimes—unconscious habit, he thought—touched the necklace that she wore, that bore a cross, and objects that he did not know; or touched the center of her bodice, where rested that golden image that he had returned to her—a peasant girl, who possessed such a thing, a bit of gold strangely at variance with her rough dress and work-worn hands.

My ancestors, she had said, the Barrow-kings.

“Have you clan?” he asked her suddenly, startling her: her eyes gazed at him, wide.

“We are Mija,” she said. “Ila died out. There is only Mija left.”

Myya. Myya and Yla. His heart seemed to stop and to begin again, painfully. His hand fell from her shoulder, as he recalled Morija, and that clan that had been his own undoing, blood-enemy to him; and lost Yla, that had ruled Morija once, before the Nhi.

“Myya Geraine Ela’s-daughter,” he murmured, giving her foreign name the accents of Erd, that lay among mountains her folk had almost forgotten.

She looked at him, speechless, with her tangled hair and bruised face, barefoot, in a dress of coarsest wool. She did not understand him. Whatever anger there was between him and Myya, it had no part with Jhirun Ela’s-daughter; the blood-feud the Myya had with him carried no force here, against a woman, in the drowning wastes of Hiuaj.

“Come,” he said again, and gathered her the more closely against his side, begi

Myya hated well, and waited long for revenge; but he refused to think such things of Jhirun; she was a companion, on a road that was otherwise alien, and seemed endless, in a silence that otherwise was filled with the wind and the bubbling waters.

There were things worse than an enemy. They lay about him.

In the evening, with the light fading into streamers of gold and red, they walked a place where the marsh had widened and trees were few. Reeds grew beside the road, and great flocks of white birds flew up in alarmed clouds when they drew near. Serpents traced a crooked course through the stagnant pools and stirred the reeds.

And Vanye looked at the birds that taunted them and swore in desire, for hunger was a gnawing pain in his belly.

“Give me a strip of leather,” Jhirun asked of him while they walked; and in curiosity he did so, unlacing one of the thongs the ring at his belt held for use on harness. He watched while her strong fingers knotted it this way and that, and understood as she bent to pick up a stone. He gave her a second strip to improve her handiwork, and the sling took shape.

A long time they walked afterward, until the birds began to wing toward them; and of a sudden she whirled the sling and cast, a skilled shot. A bird fell from the sky; but it fell just beyond the reeds, and almost as it hit the water something rose out of the dark waters and snapped it up. Jhirun simply stood on the bank and looked so wretched that his heart went out to her.

“Next time,” she said.

But there were no more birds. Eventually, with night upon them, Jhirun pulled up a handful of reeds, and peeled them to the roots, and ate of this, offering one to him.

It eased the ache in his belly, but it had a bitter taste, and he did not think a man could live long on such fare. Ahead stretched a flat and exposed land, the road the only feature in it; and in the sky the moons began to shine, five in number.

The Broken Moon, Jhirun named them for him as they walked; and stately Anli, and demon Sith, that danced with Anli. Only the greatest moon, Li, had not yet risen, but would appear late in the night, a moon so slow and vast the fragments of the Broken Moon seemed to race to elude it.

“In the old days,” Jhirun said, “there was only one.

“Whole Moon and whole land; and then the Wells gave weal; came the Three and rived the Moon, and then the Wells were sealed. That is what the children sing.”

“Three what?”

“The three moons,” she said. “The Demon and the Ladies. The Moon was broken and then the world began to sink; and some say when there is only the sea left, then Li will fall into it and the world will shatter like the Moon. But no man will be alive to see that.”

Vanye looked at the sky, where what she named as Anli rode, with the tiny orb of Sith beside it. By night there was a cloud in which the moons moved: moondust, Morgaine had called it. He thought that apt, a sorcery of the perishing world, that it perish at least in beauty, a bow of light to form the path of the moons. He remembered Li, that hung as a vast light above the clouds two nights past, and shuddered to think of it falling, for it looked as if it truly might.

“Soon,” said Jhirun, “will be Hnoth, when Li overtakes the others, and then the waters rise. It is close—and then this road will be all underwater.”

He considered this, brooding upon it. Of Morgaine there had been no sign, no track, no trace; Jhirun’s warning added new anxiety. But Morgaine would not delay on low ground; she might at the moment be no farther behind them than the trees that lay on the horizon.

He marked how wearily Jhirun walked, still striving to match his stride, never once complaining, though she breathed hard in her effort. He felt his own legs unsteady with exhaustion, the armor he wore a torment that set his back afire.

And Morgaine might be only a little distance behind them.

He stopped, where a grassy bank faced the shallowest tract of marsh; he took Jhirun by the arm and brought her there, and cast himself down, glad only to have the weight of mail distributed off his back and shoulders. Jhirun settled with him, her head on his chest, and spread her bedraggled shawl wide to cover as much of them both as might be.

“We will walk again before sunrise,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed.

He closed his eyes, and the cessation of pain was such that sleep came quickly, a weight that bore his mind away.

Jhirun screamed.

He jerked awake, hurling her back from him; and looked about, realizing that they were alone. Jhirun wept, and the forlorn sound of it oppressed him. He touched her, finding her shaking, and gathered her to him, his own heart still laboring.

She had dreamed, he thought; the girl had seen enough in their journey that she had substance enough for nightmares. “Go back to sleep,” he urged her, holding her as he might have held a frightened child. He settled back again, his arms tightly about her, and his mind oppressed by a dread of his own, that he was not going to find Morgaine. She had not come; she had not overtaken them; he began to think of delaying a day in this place, giving her surely enough time to overtake him.

And thereby he might kill himself and Jhirun, being out upon this flat stretch of road when next a storm came down and the water rose. For Jhirun’s sake, he thought that he should keep moving until they found safety, if safety existed anywhere in this land.

Then, without Jhirun, he could settle himself to wait, watching the road, to wait and to hope.

Morgaine was not immortal; she, like Roh, could drown. And if she were gone—the thought began to take root in him—then there was no use in his having survived at all—to become again what he had been before she claimed him.

Hunted now, it might well be, by other Myya, for Jhirun’s sake.

Morgaine had seen a forest grow; against his side breathed something as terrible.

Jhirun still wept, her body racked by long shudders, whatever had terrified her still powerful in her mind. He tried to rest, and so to comfort her by his example, but she would not relax. Her whole body was stiff.

Sleep weighed him into darkness again, and discomfort brought him back, aware first that the land was bright with moonlight and then that Jhirun was still awake, her eyes fixed, staring off across the marsh. He turned his head, and saw the risen disc of Li, vast, like a plague-ridden countenance; he did not like to look upon it.

It lit all the land, bright enough to cast a shadow.

“Can you not sleep?” he asked Jhirun.

“No,” she said, not looking at him. Her body was still tense, after so long a time. He felt the fear in her.

“Let us use the light,” he said, “and walk some more.”

She made no objection.

By noon, wisps of cloud began to roll in, that darkened and grew and spread across the sky. By afternoon there was cloud from horizon to horizon, and the tops of the occasional trees tossed in a wind that boded storm.

There were no more rests, no stopping. Jhirun’s steps dragged, and she struggled, gasping in her efforts, to hold the pace. Vanye gave her what help he could, knowing that, if she ever could not go on, he could not carry her, not on a road that stretched endlessly before them.

In his mind constantly was Morgaine; hope began to desert him utterly as the clouds darkened. And beside him, on short, painful breaths, Jhirun began nervously to talk to him, chattering hoarsely of her own hopes, of that refuge to which others of her land had fled, those that dared the road. Here lay wealth, she insisted, here lay plenty and safety from the floods. She spoke as if to gather her own courage, but her voice distracted him, gave him something to occupy him but his own despair.

And of a sudden her step lagged, and she fell silent, dragging on his arm. He stopped, cast her a glance to know what had so alarmed her, saw her staring with vague and frightened eyes at nothing in particular.

There was a sound, that suddenly shuddered through the earth. He felt it, caught at Jhirun and sprawled, the both of them nothing amid such violence. He pulled at her arms, drawing her from the water’s edge, and then it was past and quiet. They lay facing each other, Jhirun’s face pale and set in terror. Her nails were clenched into his wrists, his fingers clenched on hers, enough to bruise. He found his limbs trembling, and felt a shudder in her arms also. Tears filled her eyes. She shook her tangled hair and caught her breath. He felt the terror under which Jhirun lived her whole life, who claimed her world was dying, whose very land was as unstable as the storm-wracked heavens.