The Avengers of Carrig (9 page)

Saikmar son of Corrie, penniless refugee, headed down the long draughty corridor of the sanctuary toward the twisted doorway across which the wind already whined and occasionally howled. He walked with determination, as though alert for the possibility of ambush.

Indeed, as he came close to the exit, he was waylaid by the old priestess Nyloo and her constant companion, a girl-child of about seven or eight—one of those that a woman pilgrim had borne during a pious visit and left as an offering. The child’s eyes were round and prematurely wise. Saikmar was always disquieted by such children.

The old priestess said, “You’re bound outward, Saikmar son of Corrie?” She spoke the queerly accented antique dialect that he had now come to understand well. “Outside it grows cold. Not long from now to build snow-walls at the door and close the chill away.”

Saikmar had long passed the stage when he had addressed the staff of the sanctuary obsequiously. He answered in a harsh tone, “And what is it to you if I freeze out there? Will you not have one less useless mouth to stuff with food this winter?”

Nyloo looked at him steadily. She was very, very old; the skin on her skull, which was almost bald, seemed dry and crackly, like poor-grade parchment. She said, “You take complaining from your fellows too much to heart. Not I nor any other priest or priestess blames you that we lack our due this summer. For more generations than it is remembered we have served by giving asylum to those who flee injustice and tyranny, as you yourself do, hoping only that we might receive, each summer, gifts from fertile climes to fill our bellies during the long winter night. From Carrig nothing has come this year—yet how can it be the fault of a fugitive?” She gave a shrug. “The old and the weak who have used up their lives will resign themselves that the young and strong may see another summer.”

“Are you going to die this winter, granny?” said the Child, looking up at the old woman with her big round eyes. Saikmar seized his chance, flung his threadbare cloak around him, ducked his head as one does when rushing an attacker, and hurried out into the bitter afternoon.

Gasping sometimes as gusts whipped powdery dry snow off ledges and outcrops and blasted them at his face, he set himself to climb the jagged rocks surrounding the sanctuary. It had become a daily habit with him to scramble among the cavern-riddled cliffs hereabouts till he could stand at last on a crest and stare over the silvery scarred dome of the sanctuary, over the landscape that at this point in the year still showed some rock after the summer thaw, but that soon would be blank snow as far as the eye could reach—stare achingly south, toward Carrig that he perhaps would never see again.

Staring, he remembered. How Belfeor and his evil kin—men claiming to be of the southland but some of whom did not even speak the southland tongue, and women with them as arrogant as men—had claimed their right to be established as a clan and rule Carrig; how they were at first resisted, but how they, in the end, repressed all opposition through their strange magical powers; how they then set the people to unheard-of tasks among the Smoking Hills, driving diem cruelly and killing many. How Sir Bavis Knole—maddened, men said, because he had had to concede that Belfeor had come legally by his right to rule—had cast himself from the watchtower of the fortress to his death on the rocks of the citadel after his son Ambrus had taken service with Belfeor and forsworn his clan …

He shivered, standing on the cliff’s edge, and wrapped his cloak still tighter about him. The sky, even in the afternoon, was darkling at this season. Soon the night would come—the night that would last half a year. He had lived through one such night already, and had not believed it until it was upon him. The darkness! The loneliness! Outside the howling of the wind, inside the chanting of the priests as they rehearsed their charms to assure the rebirth of the sun.

Could he endure another such winter? Not for the first time he thought about following Sir Bavis’ example; a headlong plunge from this clifftop would surely break any
man’s skull and give release to the spirit within. But he drove the notion firmly from his mind. Had it been his duty to seek death, he could have found it long ago, at home in Carrig, when those who most vigorously opposed Belfeor were being put to the sword.

But then they had counseled him—his mother, his uncle, and his cousins with one voice—to travel to the northern sanctuary before Belfeor’s men came for him, to preserve his life against the day when it would be possible to strike back. The sanctuary had offered asylum to fugitives since legendary times; their fee was paid by the cities entitled to such protection by pilgrims who brought barrels of dried fish, salted vegetables, and sun-dried smoked meat with them on their summer visits. Without this addition to what they could grow on their poor soil during the short summer, those at the sanctuary would doubtless starve in the winter.

Last summer, though they had been fewer than ever before, there had indeed been a handful of pilgrim caravans, and he had eagerly demanded from them news of Carrig. All the news was bad; at least, though, it was a link with his home. This summer just ending … nothing. Not one caravan had come through Carrig to the, far north.

Saikmar looked down past his feet. His mouth set in a hard line as the tempting idea of suicide returned. There was a clear fall of sixty feet to a slanting jagged scree of loose stone. One step might free him of his fate. Better that way, surely, than to become like those others he had found here at the sanctuary, the other refugees—miserable, cringing beggars skulking down the passageways, without pride, without hope.
That
was no fit end for Saikmar son of Corrie! A noble should confront death with defiance, before the burden of the world forced his back to bow.

Oh yes! Better silence and darkness and the age-long wait for rebirth than to suffer the winter under the resentful stare of the priests and priestesses and the terrible wise children who shared the secret of their mysteries. One step …

He squared his shoulders and threw his head back for a last look at the world, and in the darkening sky he saw an omen. For the first time in his life he was sure beyond
doubt that the gods had sent him a personal sign.

There, circling and swooping in the gathering dusk, but unmistakable to a man who had spent years studying the habits of that species, was a creature that no one had ever seen so far north before. Splendid in dark blue, green, and gold against the sunset, it was a young male parradile.

Shivering with awe and not with cold, Saikmar saw it hesitate, hover, and plunge. On the sheer face of the cavern-riddled cliff it touched, clung, folded its wings, and disappeared.

Early next morning—he had hardly slept for his feverish excitement—Saikmar left the sanctuary again. He had known since he saw the parradile what he must do: go to it and throw himself on its mercy and the gods’. For was the parradile not also a fugitive in these barren wastes? That it should have wandered so far north suggested that Belfeor’s sacrilege had reached unheard-of heights—he must have hunted the parradiles out of the Smoking Hills!

The creature might, of course, kill him—drive him from the mouth of its chosen cave so that he fell to his death among the rocks. What matter? It would be better for his chances of a good reincarnation than suicide. It might, on the other hand, be drowsy with the cold and ready to hibernate, in which case it would simply ignore him. At least he could greet it and make it an offering.

He felt lightheaded as he started to scramble across the cliff-face to the cave where he had seen it settle, and small wonder. Lack of sleep, and tormenting excitement, and lack of food together, accounted for that. He had eaten neither his supper last night nor the handful of parched grain and dried fruit he was given this morning. They were in a pouch at his belt as his offering to the parradile.

The task of reaching the cave was a dreadful one. The parradile had had no trouble; it could settle anywhere it had room to keep its wings spread until its feet found purchase. Saikmar had to clamber along icy ledges, sometimes chipping himself a handhold with his knife, with the wind whipping his cloak until it threatened to fill like a sail and drag him away. In many of the caves he passed he saw with dismay that last night’s frost had spread a layer of
ice. How would a parradile, accustomed to the warm caves of the Smoking Hills, endure a winter here? Spring would see it a rigid corpse!

Whatever he could do to help the creature live, he would—at the risk of his own life if necessary. He toyed with the idea of telling the priestess in charge of the food-store that he was going to kill himself and wanted to take the rations he would otherwise consume during the winter and give them to the parradile. He dismissed it. She would laugh in his face. The parradile had no place in the sanctuary’s cult. To these people here it was merely a weird beast from the south. And worse yet … He shuddered as a fresh point struck him. They might come out and try to kill the parradile, for its meat would keep well in the chill of winter and would valuably supplement their stores.

No: better mention it to nobody at all.

Another idea he considered: bringing his meals here as long as he could. But it would only be a week, ten days at most, before they closed off the door to the sanctuary with a snow-wall; from then until spring no one would go outside. And after eating nothing for two or three days he, Saikmar, would be too weak to make the climb and deliver the food anyway.

What
was
he to do?

At last he set his foot where the parradile had landed, on a ledge of ice-free rock at the mouth of a cave which he had to enter stooping. Here he was in shadow, though much of the cliff-face he had traversed was bright with sunlight reflected off the snow, and he had to pause while his eyes adjusted. Sniffing, he knew he was at the right place. He had whiffed the scent of parradiles before, and its pungency was unique—though not at all unpleasant, somewhat resembling the resinous incense the priests burned in the great temple at home.

He opened his pouch of food and took a handful of fruit and grain on his palm. Holding it out before him he ventured into the cave.

And had gone five paces before he realized that it was empty.

Thunderstruck, he let the food fall. But the odour of parradile was unmistakable! Where in the name of the gods had the creature gone?

His first thought was that some shadow at the rear of the cave must indicate a tunnel farther into the rock, but he hammered on the wall in vain. All solid. The parradile had gone away for sure.

After his elation, the shock of disappointment made his eyes sting with tears. Half-blinded he stumbled back to the cave-mouth, putting his head in his hands. He was so lost in Hack misery that he did not hear the slap of the parradile’s wings until they were close enough for their wind to fan his skin.

He snatched his hands from his eyes in alarm—and the creature was there, on the same ledge with him, wings half-folded but giving the occasional twitch to keep a balance, head cocked suspiciously, sharp eyes studying him, red mouth closed around something which looked familiar.

A bolt of cloth! A bolt of heavy woollen cloth of the kind men wove out of graat-hair in the country east of Carrig!

But the problem of what a parradile might need with, cloth could wait. There was the more urgent matter of whether it was going to attack him or not; after all, men had been killing its ancestors in their annual ritual for uncountable generations.

Perhaps, however—the point did not occur to Saikmar until much later—they had never made a connection between men and their gliders, possibly even regarding the latter as creatures like themselves. At any rate, it took this one only a few seconds to decide Saikmar was no kind of threat. Although a mere four or five years old, not due to mature for two or three more, it was already bigger and heavier than a man, and enormously strong.

It let the bolt of cloth fall to the ground and began to nose it into the cave. Only then did Saikmar notice that in both its taloned feet it gripped spreading bundles of unwoven graat-hair on which it moved shuffling, like a man in too-big slippers. When the bolt of cloth was well inside the cave, it kicked its feet free of the clumps of hair and pushed than in also.

Making itself a nest for the winter …?

Saikmar could conceive of no other explanation. But no one had ever heard of a parradile making a nest!

Nosing the cloth along the floor of the cave, the parradile
encountered the grain and fruit Saikmar had let fall. Its tongue slapped the rock wetly and scooped them up. Encouraged, and recalling that parradiles were notoriously hearty eaters because it cost them so much energy, to hoist their weight aloft, Saikmar fumbled more food from his pouch with clumsy hands and held it out. The parradile examined it warily; then, convinced this was the same as what it had just gobbled, it opened its mouth. Saikmar turned his palm over and spilt the morsel into the blood-colored maw.

The parradile gave a snort of approval and snuffed at the pouch. He took it off and inverted it; the entire contents did not make a mouthful for the beast. Seeming disappointed, it wiped the pouch with its tongue for the last few crumbs, leaving a long moist trail, then pushed past him and tipped off the ledge again. His last sight of it was as it swooped and dived toward the south.

He began to laugh. He laughed until his ribs ached and the cold air was torturing his throat, and then he laughed again.

The next day, when he returned, the parradile had half-filled the cave with soft, warm materials—stolen cloth woven by men, graat-hair, dry grasses, whole animal-hides tanned and softened for leather. Out of this mass the creature’s head poked ridiculously, teeth displayed in a warning snarl. But that lasted only a moment; then it appeared to recognize him, and relaxed.

He offered it food again, but this was refused, and the creature seemed to be trying to explain that it had fed well, for it opened its jaws wide and blew breath scented with a raw-meat tang.