The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [116]
“Get him here now. What does the blackstaffer look like?”
I patted Gairloch again as we eased through the open gate, slow step by slow step, and out onto the stone pavement leading southward.
…click…click…click…
“GET HIM UP HERE!” The guard captain’s voice echoed out toward us. I shivered, and not from the wind out of the north, though that was chill enough. Crossbows carried a long way.
“…hold up here, mother. Them’s guards having a stew about something…”
We edged past the battered and narrow wagon on which two thin figures, radiating the honest disorder that had to have been age, sat and pulled a single mule to a halt.
“…keep moving, old farts…”
They didn’t but we did. I had to force myself to keep breathing with each step from Gairloch, to keep patting him and sending reassuring signals to him. Without the pony I would have been wearing crossbow quarrels.
The bitterness of frozen and rotted field stubble swirled past me, and my legs seemed like they would knot into cramps so tight I would fall from the saddle…and my throat was tight…
When we reached the crossroads a kay from the gate I began to relax, but did not drop the light-reflective shield. While I was convinced we were too far for either an order-master or a chaos-master to detect the shield, if we appeared on an open road in plain sight of the walls, even a kay away, it would only be instants before a troop was dispatched. And although Gairloch was steady, I doubted that he could outrun true cavalry chargers on the road. In the mountains, perhaps, but not on the road.
So, cloaked from sight, I rode the south road quietly, as the surface changed from stone to smooth-packed clay, angling always toward the mountains I could sense vaguely in the distance until I was certain that the walls of Jellico had vanished behind multiple rows of the low rolling hills that seemed to lead toward the mountains.
Even past noon, even with the steady kays we had covered, wagons passed. Horsemen passed, and two post-carriages. I even had to ride around peddlers on foot, and a party of pilgrims, the one-god variety.
First the hills were low and rolling, covered in winter grass or crop stubble, the fields arranged in regular patterns and confined by low stone walls, with occasional hedgerows. Those huts close enough to the road for me to sense were ordered enough, if impoverished and stark.
When we crossed another road, running east-west—or so it appeared to my limited senses—I encountered no more wagons, and but a single horseman, a post-rider, I suspected.
As the hills had become steeper, the cultivated fields gave way to grasslands, separated from the road by a stone wall whose maintenance was haphazard. The smooth-packed clay turned to mud frozen in ruts, and Gairloch’s pace slowed even more.
Very shortly thereafter, over the crest of the second hill past the other road, beside a high tangle of brush in a dip in the road, and after listening carefully for what I might not sense, I unwove the shield.
The wind was chill by mid-afternoon, and thick gray-roiling clouds had covered the blue skies of that morning when I had left Jellico. For all that, never had the gray of the sky, the sere brown of the grass by the roadside, the tan-gray of the stone walls at the field edges, never had they seemed so vivid.
I dismounted and studied the brown tangle where the hedgerow overtopped the wall, then glanced to the wonder of the clouds, taking a deep breath of air that seemed fresher just because I could see with my eyes again.
Near the top of the hill, further along the crest and away from the road, grazed a handful of black-faced sheep. Even seeing them was welcome.
I patted Gairloch. “You’re one hell of a pony.”
He didn’t even whinny, just accepted it.
I took a long drink from the water bottle. My throat was dry. Not knowing what action might dissolve our cover, I had done nothing but ride and had held nothing but the reins throughout the long departure.
Thurummm…urummmm…As if to greet me, along with the thunder, light raindrops began to fall upon my upturned