‘But Jasmine, little flower, I am afraid.’
They wept together in the night, and were comforted together in the night, and for a time forgot the needs of the gods in their own.
Thewson drove the group north at speed, insisting that they make a ‘battle march’ in each day instead of the ‘wagon march’ or ‘man march’ which he alleged had been their pace. He explained that a wagon march was such a distance as women and children might make in a day while accompanying laden wagons; a man march was what a hunter would travel, not hurrying, but striding strongly; a horse march was faster yet; and a battle march fastest of all. It meant exhaustion for Jasmine and the little people, grim-faced weariness for the others. They did not argue. What Doh-ti had told them about Lithos together with the stinking wagon trains and the endless flow of black-robed forces to the south made them eager to make haste, to find help in the north or fail; in either case to do what they might do as quickly as possible.
‘We will come to Seathe in ten days, fifteen if there is much delay at the Abyss,’ said Lain-achor. ‘Today is the first of the month of Wings Returning, “Gomimada,” as the northerners would say. We will come to Seathe by midmonth, four bundles of days or less, counting northern style.’
‘And will Seathe be closed?’ asked Jasmine. ‘Against us? Against everyone?’
‘Wa’osu,’ answered Thewson. ‘It may be. Vaa-nah, xoxal-nah – their separation, their gathering, who can say? We will know when we come there. My voices say only, “Go quickly.’“
Jasmine and Mum-lil shared a sympathetic grimace and settled into the travelling pace once more. Jasmine’s nausea had passed, but her back ached more with every day’s journey.
Three days after crossing the Nils they forded the northern fork of that same river, still bearing northeast. Behind them the mounds littered the plain, small villages betrayed themselves by lines of smoke; before them stretched the grasslands and the line of fire hills beyond the Abyss. The Abyss itself they could not see, for it cut deeply into the grasslands, plunging downward with no warning into the dark depths of the earth. Rivers and streamlets emptied into the Abyss. None flowed out of it. The city of Seathe lay beyond it, connected to the southern rim by a narrow bridge built in the age of the wizards, a silver arch flung high and frozen, a spider’s web of light a hundred man heights above the prairie, a height unknown above the depths of the Abyss. It was from this height that Sud-Akwith had cast his sword. It was by this height that travellers reached Seathe, or by a journey of four or five ‘battle marches’ around the eastern end of the Abyss through stony badlands. Twice they saw distant wagon trains going south, but they were far to the east along the River Rochagor, no threat to the travellers.
Jasmine caught Thewson watching her more than once. ‘It won’t kill me,’ she growled at him. ‘I have been pregnant before, warrior. It will only be four months along by the time we reach Seathe. Scarcely enough to notice. Not enough to interfere with travel.’
‘When we get to Seathe,’ he said, ‘you will go with Sowsie to Gombator – to Tanner. Also the little people. The others, too, to guard and protect.’
Jasmine protested that Tanner would be walled, closed and Separated as the rest of the known world, but Thewson was adamant. He spoke enigmatically of his voices and would not be moved.
‘So,’ thought Jasmine, ‘it is not enough he goads me this way and that, but now I must be goaded this way and that by his voices as well.’ She tried for the better part of a day to stay angry at him – or at his gods, but he was too familiar to her and his gods too strange to maintain the pique. Since each day in the saddle was a kind of torture, she could not oppose him with as much force as she might have wished.
Daingol scouted the bridge on the tenth day, returning to tell them that a crowd of horsemen, wagons, traders, and village people were waiting to cross the Abyss. ‘There is much excited talk,’ he said. ‘Seathe was abandoned by the Gahlians some days since – Seathe and, it is said, all the northlands. The traderssay that virtually all departed to the south. Some say Orena, some Lakland, some say to the Concealment itself.’
‘Where do you think they go?’ asked Jasmine. ‘Sowsie, where do you think?’
‘To Orena,’ she answered. ‘It is there that the Remnant dwell – the last power of the ancient time – or so it is said. Of course they go to Orena.’
‘Then Leona, the children, the women from the Hill –’
‘Are in the jaws of forever,’ said Dhariat. ‘If they got there timely. Elsewise, they are lost.’
No amount of bluster or persuasion could move them forward through the pack of wagons and men. There were traders in the mob who had not left their native villages in some years, and the camp surged with an unaccustomed air of freedom. It was three days before they could take their turn upon the span; then it was plod, plod, plod up the centre of the way in single file with the Abyss falling away beneath them and the horizon moving farther and farther into a blue haze of distance. The railing which had once guarded the edges of the span were broken in places, shattered and fallen away as though from some great disaster. Twice they passed gaping holes in the pave, resolutely not looking down. They were a full day upon the bridge, beginning at dawn and
