The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [177]
The only answer seemed to be that I had slept off the pain somehow, but if that was the case, the infection in my feet would have worsened, being untended. The pain would come, and it would be dreadful. Better lie still.
Then something warm and moist touched my face, and I gasped in fright. Gazing down at me with dark, troubled eyes was a black horse—unmistakably Gahltha.
“It is I, funaga,” he sent in answer to my thought that I was still dreaming. “I am Galta who was once Gahltha.”
“Galta?” I echoed stupidly. My eyes drifted past the horse, and questions about his change of name were swept aside in an even greater shock.
I was no longer in the cave in the White Valley, with its pervasive reek of smoke and the blackened skeletons of trees standing outside like silent sentinels.
I was lying on a flat, narrow stone ledge jutting out from a massive cliff face. I had taken the cliff for the wall of the cave, but there were no walls around me and no roof. Running in all directions from the gray-pitted cliff face was a vast, flat plain covered in snow, glittering in the moon’s cold bluish light. There was not a single tree or bush in sight. In the distance, I could see the darkly defined shapes of mountain spurs and outcrops of cracked stone.
The ice and snow, the lack of trees, and the incredible brightness of the stars told me I was in the mountains. Except that it was impossible.
I thought fleetingly that the suppressing barrier had shattered, and the accumulated pain had destroyed my mind. Madness seemed the only rational answer. I giggled at the paradox but shivered when the sound echoed.
The black horse watched me patiently, his dark coat almost blending with the pelt of the night.
I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it with an audible snap, thinking of the queer dream I had fallen into after Daffyd had gone. If it had been a dream.
Carefully, I levered myself into a sitting position. There was no pain in my feet or legs. I looked down.
My legs were bare and unscarred. I touched them reverently, remembering I had done that in the dream. Only it had not been a dream. Thin legs with knobbed knees and rather long feet, but at that moment the most perfect legs in the world.
“Where are we?” I asked my feet.
“In the mountains,” the horse answered gently. He looked down at me with grave serenity, and I wondered at the change in him. The last time I had seen him, on the banks of the Suggredoon, he had been almost insane with terror and frustration. The violent impatience and scorching bitterness that had characterized his behavior had disappeared as completely as my own wounds.
“Come,” he sent. “If you are too weak to walk, I will carry you. Soon the storm will come, and it must not find us in the open.”
I looked up at the cloudless sky, wondering why he thought there was going to be a storm. But I left my doubt unspoken. So much had happened that was impossible to explain that a clear sky might easily hide a storm. I pulled my socks and shoes back on and slid from the ledge, tensing myself for the pain that had been part of my life for so long.
There was a faint jarring but no pain. I stared down at my feet in fresh wonder.
“I have found a place nearby,” he explained. “There is wood. You will light a fire for us, and perhaps we will live.”
I looked up, startled, and realized with a faint shiver that he was quite serious.
“It will be a bad storm,” he sent.
I stepped forward, sinking up to my knees in powdery snow. The black horse went ahead, forging a wide track. I followed in his wake, marveling at the pleasure of walking without pain.
The wind whipped my hair and skirt around now that we were away from the buffer of the cliffs, and the cold stole into my bones long before we reached the shelter. It turned out to be a cave at the end of a narrow cleft. I sighed, thinking I was in danger of becoming accustomed to living in caves; I had seen the inside of so many. This one was quite big, dry, and surprisingly warm, being cut off from the wind