CHAPTER 17

The road south from the castle was washed with rain already. The downpour had stripped whatever browned or reddened leaves had remained clinging to the trees, and now the countryside was bare and gray and gloomy, at last making good on the winter the skies had promised for a while.

There were twenty of us, only six of us Knights. Sir Robert could have brought his palace guards, but the practical man within him recoiled at leaving Castle di Caela undefended. He could have brought part of his escort, but the Solamnic Knight in him recoiled at “sending an army to do a Knight’s work,” as he put it. So they were left behind.

Though it seemed to me that this was the time for armies, for catapults and ballistae and engines of war—anything to take the Scorpion’s attention from yours truly—the task ahead of us began with twenty of us, and twenty of us only.

Bayard rode in the lead atop Valorous. Sir Robert brought up the rear on Estrella—I believe he was back there to round up any Pathwardens trying to escape. I rode in the middle, sandwiched between brothers and soaked in the dismal morning showers.

Alfric’s gloom was contagious. He sat atop his horse, wrapped in a bulky blue robe, the hood pulled so far over his face that he looked like a huge, animate bag of wet laundry. Even his horse, no monument to spirit to begin with, bowed its head sullenly against the cold morning rain.

He felt swindled, he had claimed back at the gates of Castle di Caela.

“For why,” he asked, “is everyone so sure that Enid is going to marry Bayard if we rescue her? Seems to me that it’s been decided a little too soon.”

He fell into a sulking silence.

But if Alfric’s gloom was contagious, Brithelm was thoroughly immune, his musings somewhere far from this road, this part of the country, as he sat benignly and unhooded to the worst the rain had to offer. Lost in thought, he was lost to the rest of us, His horse was his sole guide, as it followed my pack mare unquestioningly.

We rode without rest until mid-morning. It was some Solamnic notion, I suppose, that you traveled farther and more efficiently when you were so miserably uncomfortable that the prospect of ambush or a monster in the roadway would seem like a welcome break from the routine.

To make things worse, neither of my brothers was speaking—to me, to each other, to anyone, as far as I could figure. Brithelm remained lost in thought behind me, his eyes on the rain and on the eastern horizon, and Alfric was ahead of me, suspicious and sulking, no doubt trying to guess what goods I had on him and what I had told the Knights.

So I drifted in and out of slumber that morning, jogged awake by a sudden rise in the road or a dip when the pack mare slipped or sank a bit into the mud. On occasion a distant roll of autumn thunder would disturb my sleep, or the rain would drip inside my cloak and across my face, sprinkling and startling me.

One time I was jostled awake by Bayard, who had slowed Valorous and let most of the party pass him. Reining his horse in abreast of mine, he offered me a large, coarse cotton handkerchief.

“Whatever these vapors were that saddled you back at the castle, you haven’t shed them yet. I can hear your sniffling all the way up the column.”

“Who’d have thought it, Sir Bayard?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“All along you’ve made fun of these dice I carry with me. And now all of us are armed and appointed and drenched by the rain, following a prophecy that’s every bit as many-sided and cloudy as any of the Calantina readings. What’s the difference?”

“You explained the prophecy quite well for a skeptic.”

“But you haven’t answered my question. What is the difference?”

Bayard smiled and flicked Valorous across the withers with the wet leather reins. The big horse snorted and lurched toward the head of the column, and Bayard called back to me.

“Maybe no difference.”

By mid-morning of the next day, we reached the swollen eastern fork of the Vingaard River.

There was no longer time for musing, for pondering mysteries. As I looked ahead of me into the gray rush of waters, I could see that the Vingaard had overflowed its banks. Fording would be dangerous, perhaps even deadly.

“Flood time nearly, boys,” Sir Ramiro shouted, championing the obvious above the sound of the rain and the river. “Autumn is the flood season here anyway, and we have come at the wrong time …”

He looked up at Bayard sullenly, thick brows cascading water.

“… Perhaps even to the wrong place?”

Things about us grew even more ominous, even more gloomy as the rain fell and the river rose and the overcast day permitted no sun. Here at the banks of the Vingaard, it seemed as though everything was fixed against us: the clever enemy, the night’s head start, the terrible weather. Even the land itself had betrayed us.

I sat atop the pack mare. Things could be worse. We could be out there in mid-current.

“Across the ford, then, young fellow?” an elegant voice boomed in my ear, and I started at the presence of Sir Robert di Caela beside me. There was the sound of more horses approaching, and soon Sir Ledyard and Brithelm had joined us.

“Well, Galen?” Sir Robert insisted, wrapping his cloak more tightly against the mounting rain.

“Galen?” Bayard chorused, leaning forward and stroking Valorous’s mane as the big horse shouldered its way between Ledyard’s big mare, Balena, and Sir Robert’s smaller, more graceful Estrella.

“I don’t know,” I murmured into my hood. I crouched, curled up, and tried to look like a piece of baggage on the pack mare’s back.

“Speak up, boy! These are old ears and clamorous raindrops!”

“It’s just … just that I don’t think this mare of mine is going to breast that current out there. You didn’t see her in the swamp and on the mountain paths, Sir Robert. She’s far more … anxious and roundabout than she seems on level ground and a wide road.”

“We’re all a little more jumpy at an impasse,” declared Sir Ramiro, who had approached astride his big, forgiving percheron. Water cascaded off his gray wool robe like springs coursing down from a mountain lake.

“Get to what we need to do,” he said, smiling wickedly. “And leave me … to encourage the mare.”

Bayard pointed toward a stretch on the river bank, almost submerged in the rising water. Sir Robert nodded, and galloped over to inform the rest of our companions.

I could have mulled over this crossing for hours, stacked thought upon thought until I had confused myself completely and entirely, as Gileandos said I was inclined to do. But there was no time for thinking. Immediately my companions began tying together the pack mare and the mules. The Knights hitched their cloaks tightly about their legs so as not to tangle in the rushing water.

And Sir Ramiro slapped the rump of the pack mare sharply with his enormous hand. She started and leaped toward the water.

We were fording the Vingaard.

The water was icy cold about my ankles. I drew my feet from the stirrups of the saddle, thought twice about it, and braved the water for the purchase on the back of my steed.

The mare grunted, then breasted the current. To the right of all of us squires, Brithelm’s horse began to navigate the waters, and to the right of him was Sir Robert on Estrella. Beyond them was Alfric, then two other Knights, then Ledyard and Ramiro, and then Bayard, of course, active and secure atop Valorous.

Alfric, who had been challenging Bayard’s authority at every turn of the road, was more than willing to let my protector take the rightmost path.

The boy to the immediate right of me, a blond-haired gap-toothed monstrosity from Caergoth, grinned hatefully at me.

“Got that mare in line?” he taunted nasally. “Or is it the rider that’s got to be pushed through the water?”

“Those teeth will look good tangled in seaweed,” I replied, and slapped the pack mare on the rump again. We slid farther out into the current, then sagged in the water a moment as the riverbed gave way beneath the mare and she began to swim.

I pressed my knees against her sides. I held to her mane so tightly that she snorted and shook her head at first: then I loosened my grip, but not too much, thinking of the current that could carry a drowned body almost all the way to Thelgaard Keep.

In midstream the waters were indeed tricky, plunging into an undertow deep and powerful along the spine of the river. When we reached that point in the crossing, we were pulled more insistently, more heavily.

One of the mules brayed behind us, and through the rain I saw a bundle slip from its back into the driving current. The gap-toothed boy reached for it in vain.

“I’m losing hold!” he cried, and toppled into the water.

“Brithelm!” I screamed frantically as the boy slipped downstream behind my brother.

It sounded thin and shrill and cowardly above the roar of the river. I was almost embarrassed to have cried out, for certainly someone would haul the oaf from the water. But then a swell in the current rushed over us, knocking me from the back of the mare.

I was dangling from the saddle by my right ankle, which had lodged in the stirrup and had twisted in all directions. But the ankle held, and the stirrup held, and my head was above the surface, gasping and coughing out the water that rushed by me and into me.

I windmilled my arms frantically, recalling the times I had seen people swim and hoping that going through the actions would somehow give me control over the current that was dragging me southward to death. Several times I went under, and thinking too fast, I recalled the legends about going under for the third time.

How many times had it been? Six?

Another swell of water rolled over me.

Seven?

Through the glaze of river water and sunlight I saw a hand over me, large and extended somewhere up in the air I was longing to get to. My head surfaced for a moment, long enough to hear Ledyard cry out, “Here, boy!”

Then came the dark and marbled green of the water, and the sense of coming unmoored, of being carried by the current.

It was not too bad, really, this floating. It was for a moment like emerging from a deep and immensely satisfying dream, or returning there. I could not figure which, and soon I ceased to bother with figuring altogether.

Was this what the fish saw, looking up?

The light, green and then gold where the sunlight broke upon it?

Was this the last vision of the drowned, before the weeds entangled them and made them cold?

I did not care, relaxing, enjoying the movement and light, preparing to forget all of them: Enid and Dannelle, my brothers and Sir Robert and …

Bayard.

Who pulled me by the hair from the current, up into the cold and into the painfully bright light where it hurt so much to breathe that I felt dizzy and sick.

He draped me over the saddle, pounding on my back as he did so, and I coughed water for what must have been an hour.

Above the water, in the dry land of harsh air and duty and of thinking too much, I forgot the current and the dangerous dreams of the river. Bayard set me gently on the southern bank of the Vingaard: I wondered about Sir Robert, the Ladies di Caela, my brothers, remembered Bayard who had drawn me from the water and from certain drowning.

Remembered the rest of our party.

Who had been halved by the river.

There is, in the easternmost fork of the Vingaard River, a sudden surge in the midstream current even more powerful than the steady undertow which is the constant bane of the rivermen and of those who foolishly try to cross.

“The Vingaard Drift,” the rivermen call it, and when they can, they defend against it by poling the boats across as you would a barge, by dropping anchor when the Drift is at its worst.

There is no prophecy that accounts for it, no way to predict its rise and its fall. Indeed, few know of it beyond those who make the river their living.

It so happened that the Drift had chosen to rise at the moment we crossed, sweeping many of us from our saddles into the merciless current. In the moment after Bayard caught me up from the tide that rushed around him, the huge, struggling form of Sir Ledyard followed in my wake.

“When I reached for him,” Bayard concluded, his voice shaking from loss of breath, from struggle and something more deep and disturbing and sorrowful, “he drew his arm away. Drew his arm away, Galen, shouting that we should save ourselves, that he would right himself downstream.”

From somewhere around Bayard I heard the sound of weeping. Brithelm, no doubt, though I could not see through the water and the memories of the water now covering my face.

“Sir Robert? Sir Ramiro?” I asked.

“They have gone to follow the path of the river, hoping for a sand bar, a downed tree, anything to which our friends might cling.

“We have no hope, Galen. By now they are deep into the plains of Solamnia. In the country of the brave and the innocent. May Sir Ledyard find the seas at last.”

“Receive them all to Huma’s breast,” rose a familiar voice behind Bayard. Alfric stood beside my protector.

“This blanket stayed dry, Weasel,” he muttered, tossing a rough wool coverlet over me.

I do not mind saying that I wept a little while after Sir Robert came heavily back from downstream and from a luckless search. The Drift had swelled, had knocked a full dozen of us, mounts and armor and weapons and all, tumbling into its dark and rushing midst. It was a tangle of limbs and blankets and outcry, Sir Ramiro told me, when he returned from the search covered with mud and river weed. Squires and Knights had tumbled southward until they were lost from sight in the strong tow of the river.

Bayard was right. We had no hope of finding them.

I wept for Ledyard, whom I would never really know, for the dozen or so drowned with him, and for the gap-toothed blond squire upon whom I had wished outrage too easily and too unluckily.

I began to wonder if this, too, was the Scorpion’s doing, if his hand was at the reins of the river, guiding the rise of the Drift at the worst possible of times.

The way ahead of us was cloudy, what awaited us at Chaktamir, dark and obscure.

Sir Robert sat wearily beside me, armor tolling metal on metal, the hour of sadness.

“It’s terribly early, I know,” he began. “All of us mourn, all of us are still … taken aback at the events of this morning.

“But another life depends on our quickness, our determination, our knowledge of the roads. Remember that Enid may be somewhere ahead of us. We must take up pursuit before something terrible happens to her in the eastlands.

“So take courage. Where do we go from here?”

His eyes were intent upon the east, the rushing sound of the river behind us and ahead of us the plains of eastern Solamnia as they rose and roughened into the tough little country of Throt—a thicket of roads and not-roads, paths and waterways, any of which the Scorpion might have taken with his priceless spoils.

We chose one path among all of these—straight to the pass of Chaktamir. Bayard rose in the saddle, shielded his eyes, and made out a copse of vallenwood on the eastern horizon that seemed to be a landmark of sorts.

Heavily and wearily we traveled east.

With the copse directly ahead of us, Bayard turned in the saddle and called back to the rest of the party.

“We go southwest from here, crossing two roads and a wheat field. Then we come to another road, which we take due east, keeping the Throtyl road to our left, the mountains to our right.”

“And soon we will reach Chaktamir?” Sir Robert called back.

It seemed that Sir Robert knew little of the lands east of his holdings. Bayard rode back to us frowning, shaking his head.

He explained, politely but briskly, leaning across Valorous’s neck.

“I’m afraid that the pass is still five days’ hard ride from here, Sir Robert. On the day after tomorrow we should pass through the Throtyl Gap into Estwilde, then two days more until the road forks, the southerly branch leading to Godshome and Neraka beyond, the easterly toward the pass itself.

“Eventually we will reach the foothills of the Khalkist Mountains, and following this same road, we will climb steadily, almost a day’s journey, until we come to Chaktamir, seated high in the land that once belonged to the men of Neraka and now is no creature’s.

“It is there, Sir Robert, that the Scorpion will wait for us. And there your daughter will rest—unharmed, I pray—awaiting us also.”

Their heads moved closer together, and the two men exchanged words in private.

Alfric leaned far over his saddle to try and catch what was being said. He heard nothing, evidently, and tried to right himself in the saddle.

But midway back to the upright position the weight of his armor took over, and he dropped from the saddle, face first onto the rocky ground. Brithelm helped my red-faced brother to his feet, while Alfric fired questions at Bayard.

“How do you know this?”

“I’ve been to Chaktamir before. Ten years ago …”

“So he has been to Chaktamir before!” Alfric exclaimed triumphantly. “You heard him say that, Sir Robert! Now I ask you: why in the name of Paladine should we let ourselves be guided by somebody who is suspiciously familiar with the places that the Scorpion goes to?”

Ramiro leaned his ampleness back on his long-suffering horse and laughed.

“Young Pathwarden, I’ve been to Chaktamir twice myself. Perhaps there’s a conspiracy afoot you haven’t noticed!”

“What’s your problem, Alfric?” Bayard asked calmly, idly stroking Valorous’s mane, clearing it of mud and stray brambles.

“Ever since we left the castle,” Alfric whined, “it’s been ‘Bayard, do this,’ and ‘Bayard, lead us here’! When we get to Enid, of course she’s going to want to marry you, on account of you’re the only one Sir Robert lets do anything!”

“Is that what is bothering you, Alfric?” Bayard asked slowly, dangerously, and I huddled deeply into the wool blanket I had been given, for I could tell by the flatness in his gray eyes that Alfric had just passed into the eye of a great and powerful storm.

“That is what bothers you, when we have lost fourteen to the current behind us?

“There will be plenty for you to do, Alfric,” Bayard declared coldly. “And sooner than you’d like, I’d wager.

“For our enemy is already watching.”

Bayard pointed to a spot not far ahead of us, where a bare-branched, dying vallenwood drooped heavily on the gray and rain-soaked plains.

In its topmost branches a raven perched.

Two days later, we passed through the Throtyl Gap. It is a country as rocky and forbidding as eastern Coastlund—plains, to be sure, but plains steeply rolling, rising gradually out of the fertile river lands to the west until the country around the traveler is parched and cracked, like the face of a moon through astronomer’s glasses, or like a landscape ravaged by fire.

Through this desolate region of dark, volcanic rock we were led by Bayard, at a slower pace than before because of the terrain and also because the accident at the river had left many of our horses and mules bruised and skittish. They balked, bit, kicked, and brayed through the lengthened hours of the journey.

They were not alone in their weariness, their discontent. Each of us had suffered a pounding fording the Vingaard.

Bayard and I led the way, Bayard following a worn path through the glittering rocks, occasionally calling back something to Sir Robert, who followed us. Ramiro and Alfric followed Sir Robert. Alfric crouched uncomfortably in the saddle as though he expected a hail of arrows at any time, and Sir Ramiro grew less and less amused with my brother’s cowardice and bluster as the miles wore on. Brithelm brought up the rear, and several times, to Sir Robert’s great impatience, we had to stop and send Ramiro back for him. Once the big Knight found Brithelm bird-watching, once lifting a rock to inspect more closely the hardy insect life of Throtyl Gap.

A third time Ramiro found Brithelm dazed and sitting in the middle of the trail, felled by a low-hanging branch he had not noticed while riding along rapt in meditation.

Bayard occasionally lent a hand at guiding the pack mare, but more often he was examining the rocks for the trail, mounting and dismounting as our path was lost and recovered in the hard, volcanic terrain.

Ahead of us and above us, the only birds were predators and scavengers, the only trees were pine, spruce, and a ragged strain of vallenwood which could not sink its roots deep in the rocky soil and, as a result, grew stunted and bent in the dreary landscape.

“The country of hawks,” Bayard muttered once, skillfully reining Valorous around me in order to herd the pack mare back onto the road. “The hardiest animals venture up here, and kill one another simply because there’s nothing else to prey on.”

“Sounds like growing up in the Pathwarden moat house,” I ventured, and he laughed harshly, drawing beside me as the road widened and a cold wind struck our faces from out of the south.

“Or on the streets of Palanthas,” he countered, smiling. Then he grew serious.

“Something’s come over you, Galen, and in ways I could not have foreseen back in the moat house when you first pleaded your case in front of me. You’re …”

“Less of a vermin?”

Bayard flushed.

“I’d have said ‘more cooperative,’ ” he ventured, eyes on the road ahead of him. “Were it not for your size, and …”

He looked at me, smiled, and turned away.

“… and for the absolute refusal to cooperate of that moustache you’re trying to grow, I’d take you for the oldest Pathwarden among us.

“What I’m trying to say, Galen, is that there’s Knighthood peeking out through your seams.”

I had no time to bask in the compliment. For the road was rockier, and steeply ascending, and ahead of us the hawks were turning.

By noon of the next day, it was more than hawks ahead of us. On occasion the eastern horizon shimmered with that brilliant, metallic mist that is the hand of mirage, that makes you think you are looking through water at the country ahead of you.

The mirage itself was inhabited. Strange things walked upright through the blurred landscape. Nor could we make out their form all that clearly—it was, after all, a mirage into which we looked. But dark red and brown they were, and hairless, and ever running from one fading, dissolving rock to the next one.

Sometimes the mirage would vanish, only to appear again several winding miles east of where we last saw it. Each time it was peopled by dark, scurrying forms.

The horses grew skittish at something in the air.

“W-what are they, Bayard?” I asked uneasily.

“I am not sure. I do know we have crossed into Estwilde, and if the Scorpion knows we are coming, they may be his scouts. Or his first wave of illusions.”

Sir Robert reached into his robe, drew something out, and cast it by the roadside. Sir Ramiro followed suit, and when he did I heard the faint tinkle of breaking glass.

“What’s going on, Bayard?” I asked, but my protector had not been watching. His horse had moved slightly ahead of mine, and he rode with his eyes fixed to the road ahead of us.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Sir Robert and Sir Ramiro each reached into his robe, drew something out, and threw it away. I haven’t the least idea what Robert discarded, but Ramiro’s was glass, I am sure.”

Bayard chuckled softly, murmured, “The old school.”

“I don’t understand.”

“An old Solamnic custom. When a Knight rides into battle, there is always the possibility he’ll be killed.”

“Of course.”

“If something were to happen to you, chances are there’s something on your person—something small, perhaps, but there nonetheless—that you’d rather your people not find when your body returns to them.”

“I see. And then what I saw …”

“Was our two older Knights discarding their vexations. I have no idea what Sir Robert cast aside, but Sir Ramiro’s was dwarf spirits.

“It always is.”

Deftly, quickly, Bayard’s hand flashed out from under his robe. Something small and glittering sailed through the air and into the rocks above the trail. I heard a metallic ring as something fell from rock to rock and finally settled and became still.

To this day I do not know what it was.

As we rode farther, the purple of the Khalkist Mountains rose gradually, mistily out of the eastern margins. Somewhere within those mountains lay Chaktamir, lay the pass, and when I first made them out on the horizon I thought again on the custom, of the prospect of my returning on a shield.

Yes, I had thought of it before, but always as some grand, dramatic scene out of the romances, in which everyone tore hair and wailed and apologized to my lifeless form for the injuries done me. My final return would be high theater, suitable punishment to Father for the lack of attention I received or perceived from my days in the moat house.

Now I thought of what I should discard—what it would be best if he never saw. It was between the gloves and the Calantina dice: the gloves ill-gotten, the dice smacking of eastern superstition, incantation, incense, and the sacrifice of birds.

It was a close call. For a moment I thought of discarding both, but I figured that would be excessive. Especially since I had absolutely no intention of returning to Coastlund, alive or dead.

I wondered what Enric Stormhold had cast away.

My aim had improved since the nightmarish time in the Vingaard Mountains. The dice skittered between the rocks, tumbling to rest somewhere in the high weeds that lined the path we followed.

It’s anyone’s guess what that final cast read.