Viperhand - Douglas Niles [80]
Halloran settled beside her silently. He, too, looked at the night sky and saw its beauty.
"There's the ridge," Erixitl said, lowering her eyes from the heavens slightly. The great shadow of the high slope loomed over them. "It was up there that I was captured and taken into slavery." She turned to look at him. "I haven't gone back up there since I've come home. It's silly, I guess, but I'm frightened."
"You have good cause," offered Hal. He pictured Erix as a young girl, seized by a jaguar-skinned warrior who emerged from the bushes to take her and flee. "Anyone would want to forget." He thought of the battered town in the valley below, and of how much he wanted to forget that.
She looked at him oddly. Suddenly she rose to her feet. Halloran followed her example, also following as she crossed the yard. When she started up the steep slope, he came after, on a narrow trail that they followed without difficulty in the moonlight.
For some time, they climbed in silence. The house, the village, the valley bottom all dropped away behind them. Even the scent of smoke and ash and blood from ruined Palul dissipated with distance. The wind freshened up here, and it was comfortably cool against their skin. It washed around them and seemed to cleanse some of the horror away. Still, Halloran felt the lingering presence of death behind them.
They reached the top and stopped. Erix pointed out the narrow draw where the Kultakan warrior had captured her. She explained that her father's bird snares had, at that time, extended all along the upper slopes of the ridge. Then her eyes drifted upward again.
"It seems almost as if you can touch them," she said. The stars blinked in a great dome around them. The faint illumination of dawn streaked the eastern horizon, promising eventual sunrise. "I wish the sun would wait awhile before he rises… just today."
"If I could stop it-him-for you, I would," Hal said. He wanted to tell her that he would do anything she asked. Again the mental pictures of the slaughter at Palul came to him, and he could no longer remain mute. "When I feared that you'd be caught in the battle, my terror was worse than any I have ever known."
She smiled and took his hands. "I think that I knew you'd come for me," she said softly.
"Your father spoke of us together. Shadows and light, he said. What does it mean?"
"Perhaps he means the colors of our skins," she laughed. With the sound of her laughter, Hal knew that he could never again let her go.
"Erixitl, do you know that I… I love you?" Hal asked, his voice taut. He feared to look at her face as he spoke.
"Yes, I know," she said. Her brown eyes were wide, and he wanted to fall into them as she looked up at him.
"Do… do you…" His voice caught. In answer, she reached her hands up around his shoulders, pulling his head down to hers. Halloran crushed his lips to her, and she drew them together with fiery strength. They remained in this embrace for a long time, clinging to each other for love, and strength, and hope. For these moments, Hal was aware only of this warm, loving woman in his arms.
But then the visions of treachery and slaughter returned. Halloran broke away with a tortured groan. "I can't get the pictures out of my mind!" He clasped his hands to his eyes, rubbing them savagely, but still he saw the blood and the death and the crying.
"We can't forget the killing," said Erix. Her voice was thick and her eyes filled with tears. "But neither can we deny our own life."
When her dress fell to the ground, Erixitl's skin glowed in the moonlight with a brilliant copper sheen. Her beauty, and his love for her, drove every other image from Hal-loran's mind.
"The time draws close," hissed the Ancestor, "and our plan hangs by a thread that can be sliced off by the life of a young woman!" Unprecedented passion blazed in his words.
"I repeat to you all: She must be killed!" The Darkfyre surged upward with his command,