"How will I be able to find you? To let you know?"
I smiled. It had gotten to this point without my half trying. No need to tell her the really important part. Just enough to be possibly useful to me later...
"The cards," I said, "the family Trumps. They are more than a mere sentimental affectation. They are a means of communication. Get hold of mine, stare at it, concentrate on it, try to keep all other thoughts out of your mind, pretend that it is really me and begin talking to me then. You will find that it really is, and that I am answering you."
"Those are all the things Grandpa told me not to do when I handle the cards!"
"Of course."
"How does it work?"
"Another time," I said. "A thing for a thing. Remember? I have told you now of Amber and of Shadow. Tell me of the visit here by Gerard and Julian."
"Yes," she said. "There is not really much to tell, though. One morning, five or six months ago. Grandpa simply stopped what he was doing. He was pruning some trees back in the orchard - he likes to do that himself - and I was helping him. He was up on a ladder, snipping away, and suddenly he just stopped, lowered the clippers, and did not move for several minutes. I thought that he was just resting, and I kept on with my raking. Then I heard him talking - not just muttering - but talking as though he were carrying on a conversation. At first, I thought he was talking to me, and I asked him what he had said. He ignored me, though. Now that I know about the Trumps, I realize that he must have been talking to one of them just then. Probably Julian. Anyway, he climbed down from the ladder quite quickly after that, told me he had to go away for a day or so, and started back toward the manor. He stopped before he had gone very far, though, and returned. That was when he told me that if Julian and Gerard were to visit here that I was to be introduced as his ward, the orphaned daughter of a faithful servant. He rode away a short while later, leading two spare horses. He was wearing his blade.
"He returned in the middle of the night, bringing both of them with him. Gerard was barely conscious. His left leg was broken, and the entire left side of his body was badly bruised. Julian was quite battered also, but he had no broken bones. They remained with us for the better part of a month, and they healed quickly. Then they borrowed two horses and departed. I have not seen them since."
"What did they say as to how they had been injured?"
"Only that they had been in an accident. They would not discuss it with me."
"Where? Where did it happen?"
"On the black road. I overheard them talking about it several times."
"Where is this black road?"
"I do not know."
"What did they say about it?"
"They cursed it a lot. That was all."
Looking down, I saw that there was some wine left in the bottle. I stooped and poured two final drinks, passed her one.
"To the reunion," I said, and smiled.
"... The reunion," she agreed, and we drank.
She began cleaning the area and I assisted her, my earlier sense of urgency upon me once again.
"How long should I wait before I try to reach you?" she asked.
"Three months. Give me three months."
"Where will you be then?"
"In Amber, I hope."
"How long will you be staying here?"
"Not very. In fact, I have to take a little trip right now. I should be back tomorrow, though. I will probably only be staying for a few days after that."
"I wish you would stay longer."
"I wish that I could. I would like to, now that I have met you."
She reddened and turned what seemed all of her attention to repacking the basket. I gathered up the fencing gear.
"Are you going back to the manor now?" she said.
"To the stables. I'll be leaving immediately."
She picked up the basket.
"We will go together then. My horse is this way."
I nodded and followed her toward a footpath to our right.
"I suppose," she said, "that it would be best for me not to mention any of this to anybody. Grandpa in particular?"
"That would be prudent."
The splash and gurgle of the stream, as it flowed to the river, on its way to the sea, faded, faded, was gone, and only the creak of the land-locked wheel that cut it as it went, remained for a time in the air.
Chapter 6
Steady movement is more important than speed, much of the time. So long as there is a regular progression of stimuli to get your mental hooks into, there is room for lateral movement. Once this begins, its rate is a matter of discretion.
So I moved slowly, but steadily, using my discretion. No sense in tiring Star unnecessarily. Rapid shifts are hard enough on people. Animals, who are not so good at lying to themselves, have a rougher time of it, sometimes going completely berserk.
I crossed the stream at a small wooden bridge and moved parallel to it for a time. My intention was to skirt the town itself, but to follow the general direction of the watercourse until I reached the vicinity of the coast. It was midafternoon. My way was shaded, cool. Grayswandir hung at my side.
I bore west, coming at length to the hills that rose there. I refrained from beginning the shift until after I had reached a point that looked down upon the city that represented the largest concentration of population in this realm that was like my Avalon. The city bore the same name, and several thousand people lived there, worked there. Several of the silver towers were missing, and the stream cut the city at a somewhat different angle farther south, having widened or been widened eightfold by then. There was some smoke from the smithies and the public houses, stirred lightly by breezes from the south; people, mounted, afoot, driving wagons, driving coaches, moved through the narrow streets, entered and departed shops, hostels, residences; flocks of birds wheeled, descended, rose about the places where horses were tethered; a few bright pennons and banners stirred listlessly; the water sparkled and there was a haze in the air. I was too far away to hear the sounds of voices, and of clanking, hammering, sawing, rattling, and creaking as anything other than a generalized hum. While I could distinguish no individual odors, had I still been blind I would have known by sniffing the air that a city was near.
Seeing it from up there, a certain nostalgia came over me, a wistful rag-tail of a dream accompanied by a faint longing for the place that was this place's namesake to me in a vanished shadow and of long ago, where life had been just as simple and I happier than I was at that moment.
But one does not live as long as I have lived without achieving that quality of consciousness which strips naive feelings as they occur and is generally loathe to participate in the creation of sentimentality.
Those days were passed, that thing done with, and it was Amber now that held me completely. I turned and continued southward, confirmed in my desire to succeed. Amber, I do not forget...
The sun became a dazzling, bright blister above my head and the winds began to scream about me. The sky grew more and more yellow and glaring as I rode, until it was as if a desert stretched from horizon to horizon overhead. The hills grew rockier as I descended toward the lowlands, exhibiting wind-sculpted forms of grotesque shape and somber coloration. A dust storm struck me as I emerged from the foothills, so that I had to muffle my face with my cloak and narrow my eyes to slits. Star whinnied, snuffled repeatedly, plodded on. Sand, stone, winds, and the sky more orange then, a slate-like crop of clouds toward which the sun was heading...
Then long shadows, the dying of the wind, stillness... Only the click of hoof on rock and the sounds of breathing... Dimness, as they rushed together and the sun is foiled by clouds... The walls of the day shaken by thunder... An unnatural clarity of distant objects... A cool, blue, and electric feeling in the air... Thunder again...
Now, a rippling, glassy curtain to my right as the rain advances... Blue fracture lines within the clouds... The temperature plummeting, our pace steady, the world a monochromatic backdrop now...
Gouging thunder, flashing white, the curtain flaring toward us now... Two hundred meters... One-fifty... Enough!
Its bottommost edge plowing, furrowing, frothing... The moist smell of the earth... Star's whinny... A burst of speed...
Small rivulets of water creeping outward, sinking, staining the ground... Now bubbling muddily, now trickling... Now a steady flow... Streamlets all about us, splashing...
High ground ahead, and Star's muscles bunching and relaxing, bunching and relaxing beneath me, as he leaps the rills and freshets, plunges through a racing, roiling sheet, and strikes the slope, hoofs sparkling against stones as we mount higher, the voice of the gurgling, eddying flow beneath us deepening to a steady roar...
Higher, then, and dry, pausing to wring out the corners of my cloak... Below, behind, and to the right a gray, storm-tossed sea laps at the foot of the cliff we hold...
Inland now, toward clover fields and evening, the boom of the surf at my back...
Pursuing falling stars into the darkening east and eventual silence and night...
Clear the sky and bright the stars, but a few small wisps of cloud...
A howling pack of red-eyed things, twisting along our trail... Shadow... Green-eyed... Shadow... Yellow... Shadow... Gone...
But dark peaks with skirts of snow, jostling one another about me... Frozen snow, as dry as dust, lifted in waves by the icy blasts of the heights... Powdery snow, flour-like... Memory here, of the Italian Alps, of skiing... Waves of snow drifting across stone faces... A white fire within the night air... My feet rapidly numbing within my wet boots... Star bewildered and snorting, testing each step and shaking his head as if in disbelief...
So shadows beyond the rock, a gentler slope, a drying wind, less snow...
A twisting trail, a corkscrew trail, an adit into warmth... Down, down, down the night, beneath the changing stars...
Far the snows of an hour ago, now scrubby plants and level plain... Far, and the night birds stagger into the air, wheeling above the carrion feast, shedding hoarse notes of protest as we pass...
Slow again, to the place where the grasses wave, stirred by the less cold breeze... The cough of a hunting cat... The shadowy flight of a bounding, deer-like beast... Stars sliding into place and feelings in my feet once more...
Star rearing, neighing, racing ahead from some unseen thing... A long time in the soothing then, and longer still till the shivers go...
Now icicles of a partial moon falling on distant treetops... Moist earth exhaling a luminescent mist... Moths dancing in the night light...
The ground momentarily buckling and swaying, as if mountains were shifting their feet... To every star its double... A halo round the dumbbell moon... The plain, the air above it, filled with fleeting shapes...
The earth, a wound-down clock, ticks and grows still... Stability... Inertia... The stars and the moon reunited with their spirits...
Skirting the growing fringe of trees, west... Impressions of a sleeping jungle: delirium of serpents under oil cloth...
West, west... Somewhere a river with broad, clean banks to ease my passage to the sea...
Thud of hoofs, shuttling of shadows... The night air upon my face... A glimpse of bright beings on high, dark walls, shining towers... The air is sweetened... Vision swims... Shadows...
We are merged, centaur-like. Star and I, under a single skin of sweat... We take the air and give it back in mutual explosions of exertion... Neck clothed in thunder, terrible the glory of the nostrils... Swallowing the ground...
Laughing, the smell of the waters upon us, the trees very near to our left...
Then among them... Sleek bark, hanging vines, broad leaves, droplets of moisture... Spider web in the moonlight, struggling shapes within... Spongy turf... Phosphorent fungus on fallen trees...
A clear space... Long grasses rustling...
More trees...
Again, the riversmell...
Sounds, later... Sounds... The grassy chuckling of water...
Closer, louder, beside it at last... The heavens buckling and bending in its belly, and the trees... Clean, with a cold, damp tang... Leftward beside it, pacing it now... Easy and flowing, we follow...
To drink... Splashing in its shallows, then hockhigh with head depressed, Star, in it, drinking like a pump, blasting spray from his nostrils... Upriver, it laps at my boots... Dripping from my hair, running down my arms... Star's head turning, at the laughter...
Then downriver again, clean, slow, winding... Then straight, widening, slowing...
Trees thickening, then thinning...
Long, steady, slow...
A faint light in the east...
Sloping downward now, and fewer trees... Rockier, and the darkness made whole once again...
The first, dim hint of the sea, lost an odor later... Clicking on, on, in the nightsend chill... Again, an instant's salt...
Rock, and an absence of trees... Hard, steep, bleak, down... Ever-increasing precipitousness...
Flashing between walls of stone... Dislodged pebbles vanishing in the now racing current, their splashes drowned in the roar's echoes... Deeper the defile, widening...
Down, down... Farther still...
Now pale once more the east, gentler the slope... Again, the touch of salt, stronger...
Shale and grit... Around a corner, down, and brighter still...
Steady, soft and loose the footing...
The breeze and the light, the breeze and the light... Beyond a crop of rock... Draw rein.
Below me lay the stark seaboard, where rank upon rank of rolling dunes, harassed by the winds out of the southwest, tossed spumes of sand that partly obliterated the distant outlines of the bleak morning sea.
I watched the pink film spread across the water from the east. Here and there, the shifting sands revealed dark patches of gravel. Rugged masses of rock reared above the swell of the waves. Between the massive dunes - hundreds of feet in height - and myself, there high above that evil coast, lay a smashed and pitted plain of angular rocks and gravel, just now emerging from hell or night into dawn's first glow, and alive with shadows.
Yes, it was right.
I dismounted and watched the sun force a bleak and glaring day upon the prospect. It was the hard, white light I had sought. Here, sans humans, was the necessary place, just as I had seen it decades earlier on the shadow Earth of my exile. No bulldozers, sifters, broom-wielding blacks; no maximum-security city of Oranjemund. No X-ray machines, barbed wire, or armed guards. None of these things here. No. For this shadow had never known a Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, and there had never been a Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa, nor a government to approve their amalgamation of coastal mining interests. Here was the desert called Namib in that place some four hundred miles to the northwest of Cape Town, a strip of dunes and rocks ranging from a couple to a dozen miles in width and running along that forsaken coast line for perhaps three hundred miles on the seaward side of the Richtersveld Mountains, within whose shadow I now stood. Here, unlike any conventional mine, the diamonds were scattered as casually as bird droppings across the sand. I, of course, had brought along a rake and a sieve.
