"You are the very breed."
Trehearne bent closer to her and said, "Once my family lived here.
Their name was Cahusac."
"Cahusac," she said slowly, and between her gnarled fingers the
clicking needles stopped. "Eh, that was long and long ago, and Keregnac
has forgotten the Cahusacs. They were driven out...."
"Why?"
"They had an only child, a daughter, who married one of these handsome
sons of the Evil One, and...." She paused and looked at him wisely.
"But forgive me, my old tongue has not yet learned caution."
Trehearne dropped to one knee beside her, so that he might see her
face more clearly. His heart was hammering. "No, no, _grandmere_!
Don't stop--it was to hear these things that I came all the way from
America. This daughter of the Cahusacs--she had a child?"
"And the villagers would have stoned her to death, and the babe too.
But she knew, and fled away." She straightened up and her eyes had
grown bleak and stern. "We take their silver, and that is sin enough.
And I have spoken too much, and will speak no more."
"No, please!" Trehearne said. "Who are these strangers--these Vardda?
You must know. You must tell me!"
But she sat like an image carved from dark wood, her head bent forward
over the pale wool spread in her lap. Trehearne stood up, mastering a
desire to shake her until the words came, and then he went outside.
He walked the few paces to the end of the muddy street and looked out
upon a moor that stretched still and desolate under the stars. He stood
there for a long time, staring out across the empty heath, his eyes
narrowed and intense with thought.
Into these wastes, the _landes_, Shairn had gone with Kerrel. Why, for
what purpose, he could not guess, any more than he could guess the
answers to all the other riddles, and he knew better than to ask his
host. The silence mocked him, full of secrets.
He had made some progress. He had traced his family back to Keregnac,
and he knew now the reason for their leaving. A Vardda hybrid snatched
from death at the hands of an irate peasantry--a romantic story, but
unrevealing. The answer to the riddle of his birthright lay still
farther on.
How much farther, he did not dream.
At dawn he paid off his driver and his host, mounted the horse that
was ready for him, and struck out into the moor. He had no idea what
direction he should take. However, the moor could not be endless in
extent, and if he searched long enough he was almost bound to find
what he was looking for. If Kerrel and Shairn and other "sons and
daughters of the devil" came into the _landes_, they must have shelter
of some kind.
But all that day he rode, across marshland and stony soil, through
gorse and bramble and stunted trees, without seeing a cottage or a
solitary sheep or even a distant smoke to mark a human habitation.
Only here and there a lonely tor stood like a druid sentinel against a
lowering sky.
It drew on to dusk. The wind blew, and it began to rain, a fine soaking
drizzle that showed promise of going on all night. And still the heath
stretched on all sides of him, featureless, without comfort or hope.
There was nothing to do but go on. He let the horse find its own way,
sitting hunched in the saddle, wet and wolfishly hungry and at odds
with the world.
His mood grew blacker as the light failed. The horse continued to plod
on through pitch darkness. The land rolled a good bit, and Trehearne
knew from the cant of the saddle when his mount slid down into the
hollow of a fold and then scrambled out again up the other side,
slipping and stumbling in the mud and wet gorse. It was from the crest
of one such low rise that he caught a glimmer of light, ahead and to
the left.
He said aloud, "There is a cotter's hut," and would not allow himself
to hope for anything else. But he spurred the horse on recklessly. Even
so, it seemed hours before he reached the light.
He was close onto the place before he could make out its size and shape
in the thick darkness. Then he reined in, completely baffled. This was
no cotter's hut, nor was it a manor, nor any normal sort of dwelling.
He saw a broken shaft of stone that had once been a squat crenellated
tower, and around its foot was a ruin of walls and outbuildings. It
was very old, Trehearne thought--probably medieval, and probably the
onetime stronghold of a robber baron.
A ruin, lost in the wasteland. And yet it was inhabited. Yellow
lamplight poured from the embrasures of the keep. There were horses
in the courtyard. There was a sound of voices, and in the rickety
outbuildings that leaned against the wall there were lanterns and
noises and activity. Trehearne sat still for a time, trying to make
some sort of sense out of what he saw, and failing. Then he dismounted
and let his weary animal join its fellows, going himself toward the
outbuildings and the men who were working there. He carried a small
automatic in his pocket. He was not afraid, but he was glad he had it.
There was an unsettling queerness about the place, about its situation
and whatever reason it had for being.
The wooden structures were not nearly so tumbledown as they seemed at
first look. In fact, Trehearne had a ridiculous idea that they had
been built that way deliberately. They were crammed now with crates
and packing cases, not wooden ones, Trehearne noticed, but light,
strong plastic, marked with unfamiliar symbols. Others were being
fetched up through openings in the stone that led apparently into the
cellars beneath the keep. The men who handled them, with a good deal
of laughter and loud talk, were mostly young, and all of the Vardda
stock, and their dress was as strange as their language. Trehearne
could think of no national costume that included quite that kind of a
tunic belted over loose trousers, nor that particular type of sandal.
A little shiver slid over him and he stopped just beyond the edge of
the lantern-light. The men had not seen him yet, and he was suddenly
not sure that he wanted them to. The strangeness began to come through
to him, no longer in the mass, but in small casual detail that made it
real, and now he began to be afraid, not with his body but with his
mind.
From out of the rain and the shadows close by him, someone said, "You
must be Trehearne."
The sheer reflex of tight-strung nerves closed Trehearne's grip on the
automatic and brought him whirling around. The speaker must have seen
the gesture, for he said quietly, "You won't need that. Come back a
way, I want to talk to you."
"Who--?"
"Keep your voice down! Come on."
Trehearne followed the blurred figure of a man in a yellow tunic and
dark trousers. Even in the gloom he could see that the belt around the
man's waist was studded with gems, and the fastenings of his sandals
glinted like fireflies in the wet grass. The small shiver twitched
again at Trehearne's nerves, and he kept his hand in his pocket, over
the comforting prosaic weight of the gun. He had thought at first that
the man was Kerrel, but he was too short, and the voice was different.
Neither spoke again until they had reached a blank corner of the keep
well out of sight of the sheds. Then the man stopped and turned, and
Trehearne said, "How did you know me?"
Faint light from an embrasure high above fell on the stranger's face.
It was a Vardda face, but it was not beautiful. It was ugly, and kind,
with very shrewd eyes and a merry mouth that was not really merry at
all, even when it smiled. It was smiling now.
"Your fame has come ahead of you." He nodded toward the wall and what
was beyond it. "Kerrel says you won't come, Shairn says you will.
They're all betting on you in there." He examined Trehearne closely in
the dim light, and shook his head. "I wouldn't have believed it if I
hadn't seen it. You really are remarkable."
"I've been told that before," said Trehearne sourly, and glanced at the
stone wall, remembering what Shairn had said to him at the cove. An
angry glint came into his eyes, "She's sure of herself."
"Shairn is sure of everything, and herself most of all." The man
had been drinking, but he was not even slightly drunk. His tone was
serious. "Now listen to me, my friend. I've stood around a long while
in the rain watching for you when I should have been attending to my
business, and I'm breaking a very important law right now. No one
else has seen you. Take your horse and ride like hell away from here,
and I'll forget that I have." He laid an urgent hand on Trehearne's
shoulder. "This may be hard for you to believe, but I'm offering you
your life."
The voices of the men rang down the wind, and Trehearne thought of the
crates and cases they were bringing up from below as though preparing
them for loading, and suddenly an answer came to him.
"Smuggling," he said. "You could land planes out here, and nobody would
ever know it."
"Smuggling is precisely it. Now will you go? I haven't any right to do
this, but I hate to see a man die just for a woman's amusement."
"Why are you so sure I'll die?"
"Because you're not true Vardda, and more than that I can't tell you.
Just please for God's sake go!"
Trehearne thought, He's sincere, he means it, and smuggling isn't all
the answer, these aren't common criminals. Something strange, very
strange, and maybe he's right.... The fear that he had had before rose
up in him and it was of the body now as well as the mind, a chill
premonition of the unnatural. He hesitated, and the ugly man said
softly, "Good! I'll get your horse."
There was a creak and a bang and a burst of sound as the great oaken
door of the keep swung open. The stranger pressed Trehearne flat
against the wall. The doorway was just out of sight, but Trehearne
could hear the voices clearly. They were speaking their own unfamiliar
tongue, so that what they said was lost to him, but he knew they were
talking about him. He heard his name, and the voice that spoke it was
Shairn's. Then she laughed. She didn't need to laugh. The sound of
her voice would have been enough. Trehearne flung off the stranger's
restraining arm and stood away from the wall.
"You fool!" whispered the stranger furiously, and caught at him, but
Trehearne was remembering things, words, looks, and the anger in him
burned away the fear. He walked out into the light that spilled across
the courtyard from the open door. Kerrel and a number of others, mostly
women, were standing there, but the only one he saw was Shairn, girdled
with jewels and wearing a tunic the color of flame, holding in her hand
a goblet of wine. A silence fell, and Shairn's gaze was fixed on his.
Even so, he could not read it.