The Carnelian Throne Read Free

pensive. It was he whose aegis had underwritten this trip. It was he whose couch-mate, Liuma, had been slain by those we hunted. Or would hunt, when spring thaws made the northern rivers navigable. This plausible excuse served us, each one for our own purpose. True, we all hunted here: peace, and nature, and a respite from our concerns. We had left, each of us, all that we had so recently acquired. Or tried to: what we had lost could not be regained, and what responsibilities we fled trailed determinedly at our heels. As in the mythical book of prophecy to which Chayin felt us bound, we had sailed an ocean, bearing with us a sword which might—or might not—be Se’keroth, Sword of Severance, and the material sign of that long-prophesied age, the coming of the divinity of man. Sereth subscribed not at all to that belief. So he said, now, though it had been he who first voiced the possibility. I was uncommitted. Or rather I did not want to be convinced, yet half believed. If the sword that Sereth had acquired with his accession to Silistra’s rule was Se’keroth, the blade would be quenched in ice. Until that time, I withheld both support and censure. In this place, I thought, looking around me, ice might be hard to find.
    But then, dry wood should have been hard to find.
    Chayin unburdened his arms and arranged brush and branch to his satisfaction. He lit it with a flint device, and not his mind, bending low to the piled tinder. Though Sereth was not here to see, Chayin honored his will. I might not have been so patient. It was the third try with the sparking wheel that caught. He blew into cupped hands, cajoling the spark.
    By the time I knelt at his side, the spark, judiciously nursed, had become a flame. Chayin sat back, staring into the fire.
    “I am very sure that we are being watched, and not by any artifact. Sit still! You might sense it.” Casually, he met my eyes.
    “He asked me to forgo such things,” I reminded him, unable to resist. “And you also.”
    “So scrupulous? This is no time for it. He asked, yes. Whenever possible, and if we met no men, and not to any extent that might endanger our lives. We are about to meet men.” Out of his loam-dark face the fire shone back at me, red-gold, from enlarged pupils.
    It was then that Sereth, with no more sound than a gust of wind between the trees, emerged from the swamp. Over his shoulder were two red-furred, motionless animals, lied together by the tails at his shoulder. Their black muzzles dangled around his knees. Their staring eyes, even in death, were gentle.
    “Local meal,” he announced, dropping the two warm carcasses in my lap. “Your arrows are improving.”
    I stroked the soft fur of my dinner-to-be. Then I thanked it for its flesh and took my knife to it. “What did you see?” Chayin demanded.
    “Plants and animals with which I am not familiar. No men. But man-sign,” added Sereth, taking one of the carcasses into his own lap.
    “It has come to me that we are being observed. What think you?” growled Chayin, scratching beneath his tunic.
    “I am sure of it,” said Sereth quietly, and nothing more until the little animal lay gutted and skinned before him. Then: “There is a path, very straight, wide, well-tended. It runs northwest from the wall, just.beyond those trees.” He rose, scrutinized my novice’s butchering, and went to cut a spit pole.
    By the time the meat spattered above Chayin’s fire, the constellations were beginning to poke their way through the haze. Sereth had helped me with my preparation of the meat; patient, soft-voiced as always when concerned with what he termed “life-skills.” The more deeply I had involved myself, during that long sea voyage, with affairs of mind, the more insistent he had become that I take instruction from him in weaponry, in survival on land and sea, in hunters’ lore. I knew, by then, more than I wished of butchering and the catching of fish; and less than I had hoped of what lay in