"Since gossip brought you the tale so swiftly," Eodan said, "you must
also have heard the Romans will be after us at dawn tomorrow. They have
money, and the Gauls here favor them; they'll hire guides, dogs and a
string of remounts."
"I have hunted and been hunted on plains before now," replied Tjorr. "A
flock of sheep to confuse the scent, a trackless waste as soon as we
leave this road--Oh, we can race them all the way to Parthia with good
hope of winning."
"But that is what we may not do, and why you had best return before the
King learns of your absence. I left only on Phryne's account. I shall
have to find her before undertaking such a trip, and it may consume all
the time between me and the pursuit."
Tjorr cocked an eye at him knowingly. Eodan felt his wind-beaten face
grow hot. He said angrily, "She is my oath-sister. Did she think I
would forget what that means?"
"_Da_," nodded the Alan, "or she would have given herself to
Mithradates with no fuss." He squinted down the rutted dirt road, which
wound among boulders and sere grass until it lost itself in stormy
black clouds. "Now our task is to trail her, and she would have made
herself hard to trail. We can only follow this, I think, till we come
on someone who's seen a boyish-looking horse archer go by ... for thus
I take it she equipped herself."
"So my groom told me, and he was too frightened to make up a lie. Come,
then!"
They jingled through unspeaking hours.
At day's end they passed a goatherd in a stinking wool tunic and
knitted Phrygian cap. He gave them a sullen look and mumbled his own
language, which they did not understand, through greasy whiskers.
Eodan felt grimness. Bad enough to be entering wilds where few if any
could speak with him; but this was also a land where the half-Persian
warriors had made themselves hated. He thought, as darkly and coldly as
the whistling twilight, that Flavius might well overhaul him tomorrow
before he had any word of Phryne. He might be wholly doomed; the gods
feared proud men.
Well, if such was his destiny, he would give no god the pleasure of
seeing him writhe under it.
"_Ho-ah!_" cried Tjorr.
Eodan looked up from his thoughts. The Alan pointed westward, where a
single dirty-red streak beneath steel and smoke colors marked sunset.
"A horse out there," he said. Eodan spied the beast; it was trotting
wearily north over the plain.
Horror stood up in him and screamed. He clamped back an answer of his
own, struck spurs into his mount and left the highway. The wind snapped
his cloak and tried to pull him from his seat. Once his horse stumbled
on a rock, unseen in the gloom, but he kept the saddle, swaying lightly
to help the animal muscles that flowed between his knees. And so he
drew up to the other horse.
It was a chestnut gelding with silvered harness; a light ax was
sheathed at the saddlebow--thus did the riders of Pontus equip
themselves. The beast shivered in the heartless wind; its tail
streamed, but the mane was sweat-plastered to a sunken neck. Worn out,
it groped a way back toward the king.
Eodan felt as if the heart had been cut from him, leaving only a
hollowness that bled. "Hers," he said.
"None else," said Tjorr. "A lone alien, with arms and armor worth ten
years of a shepherd's work ... a sling ... and the steed bolted--" He
looked down upon his useless hands. "I am sorry, my sister."
Eodan let her horse go. He began to follow the way it had come, as
nearly as he could judge. He would not leave Phryne's bones to whiten
on this plain. Surely the gods cared for her, if not for him. They
would lead him to her and grant him the time to make a pyre and a cairn
and to howl over her.
Dusk thickened. After some part of an hour, he heard a furtive
scuttering in the grass. He rode after it, and a naked man squeaked
forlornly and dodged from him. It was a Phrygian, wholly bare; he had
not even a staff, but he clutched something to his breast as he ran.
Eodan drew rein and watched him go.
"What happened to him?" asked Tjorr, clasping his hammer; for this was
an uncanny thing to meet on a treeless autumnal plain at nightfall.
"I do not know," said Eodan. "Robbers--the same who killed Phryne?--or
some trolldom, perhaps, for we are in no good country. We cannot speak
with that man, so best we leave him alone to his weird."
They trotted on. But it grew too dark to see, and Eodan would not risk
passing by his oath-sister. In the morning the kites would show him
from afar where she lay. Then the Romans would come, and he would stand
by her grave and fight till they slew him.
"I would like a fire," said Tjorr. He fumbled in the murk, caring for
his horse. "The night-gangers would stay away."
"They will anyhow," Eodan told him. "It is not fated that we should be
devoured by witch-beasts."
Tjorr said, with awe heavy in his tones: "I will believe that. You are
something more than a man tonight."
"I am a man with a goal," said Eodan. "Nothing else."
"That is enough," said Tjorr. "It is more than I could bear to be. I
dare not touch you before dawn."
Eodan rolled himself into the saddle blanket, put his head on his
wadded cloak and lay in cold, streaming darkness. The earth felt sick,
yearning for rain, and the rain was withheld. He wondered if some of
the lightning Tjorr called on had indeed been locked up in the hammer.
When they died tomorrow, the rain might come; or perhaps, thought
Eodan, the first snow, for he is the rain but I am the winter.