Birkin Gnif wheezed and chuckled. Cromis could raise only a thin, weary smile: he had been much disturbed by his discovery.
'Go and pull the old fool off her, Grif, and we'll take him with us. At least he'll see action again, for what it's worth.'Later, as they passed the gates of Duirinish, old Glyn dawdling drunkenly behind them, Grif said:
'She prepares her way to rule, as you say. Her confidence is immense. What can half a hundred brigands, a poet and an ancient lecher do to flex a will such as that?'
Chapter Four
Next morning, in the thin light of dawn, Grif's company wound past the dark, watchful waIls of the Stony City and into the North. Rivermist rose fading up toward the sun in slender spires and pillars. Duirinish was silent but for the tramping of guards on the high battlements. A heron perched on a rotting log to watch as the tiny force forded the northern meander of the Minfolin. If it found them curious, it gave no sign, but flapped heavily away as the white spray flew from cantering hooves.
They had abandoned their ragged, weather-stained finery for makeshift war-gear. Here and there, mail rings winked, and some of them wore odd bits of plate-armour; but for the most part, it was steel-studded leather stuff. They were a grim, rough-handed crew, with wind-burnt faces and hard, hooded eyes: their speech was harsh, their laughter dangerous, but their weapons were bright and well-kept, and the coats of their mounts gleamed with health over hard muscle.
Birkin Grif rode with wry pride at their head.
His massive frame was clad in mail lacquered cobalt-blue, and he wore over that a silk tabard of the same acid yellow as his mare's caparisons. He had relinquished his rustic hat, and his mane of blond hair blew back in the light wind. At his side was a great broadsword with a silver-bound hilt; in a scabbard hanging from his saddle-bow rested his long-axe, to hand in case he should be unhorsed. The roan mare arched her powerful neck, shook her big, beautiful head. Her bridle was of soft red leather with a subtle copper filigree inlaid.
To Cromis, riding beside him hunched against the chill on a sombre black gelding, wrapped in his dark cloak like a raven in its feathers, it seemed that Grif and his horse threw back the hesitant morning light like a challenge: for a moment, they were heraldic and invincible, the doom to which they travelled something beautiful and unguessed. But the emotion was brief and passed, and his moroseness returned.
At Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls. And behind the three Methven, Grif's men had begun to chant a rhythmic River-mouth song of forgotten meaning, The Dead Freight Dirge:
Burn them up and sow them deep:
Oh, Drive them down;
Heavy weather in the Fleet:
Oh, Drive them down;
Gather them up and drive them down:
Oh, Sow them deep;
Withering wind and plodding feet:
Oh, Drive them down!
Its effect on Cromis was hypnotic: as the syllables rolled, he found himself sinking into a reverie of death and spoliation, haunted by grey, translucent images of a shattered Viriconium. The face of Methvet Nian hung before him, in the grip of some deep but undefinable sorrow. He knew he could not go to her. He was aware of the metal bird of Cellur, gyring and hovering high above him as he rode, the embodiment of a threat he could not name.
He was sinking deeper, like a man in a drug-dream, when Grif reined in his mare and called his men to a halt.
'Here we leave the Old North Road,'he said. 'There's our way; direct but unpleasant.'
Before them, the road turned abruptly West and was lost to sight behind the black terminal massif of Low Leedale Edge: from there, it found its way to the coast and began the long journey North.
But straight ahead among the bracken and coarse grass at the mouth of the valley ran a narrow track. Fifty yards from the road, the heather failed, and the terrain became brown, faintly iridescent bog streaked with slicks of purple and oily a yellow. Beyond that rose thickets of strangely shaped trees. The river meandered through it, slow and broad, flanked by dense reedbeds of a bright ochre colour. The wind blew a from the North, carrying a bitter, metallic smell.
a 'The Metal-salt Marshes,'murmured Grif. He pointed 'to the reedbeds by the Minfolin. 'Even in Winter the colours are weird. In Summer, they bemuse the brain. The birds and insects there are peculiar, too.'
'Some might find it beautiful,'said Cromis; and he did. Theomeris Glyn snorted. He pinched his beaky nose. 'It stinks,'he said. 'I wish I hadn't come. I am an old man and deserve better.'
Grif smiled.
'This is just the periphery, greybeard. Wait until we reach the interior, and the water-thickets.'
Where the valley bracken petered out, a dyke had been sunk to prevent the herd-animals of Low Leedale from wandering into the bog. It was deep and steep-sided, full of stagnant water over which lay a multicoloured film of scum. They crossed it by a gated wooden bridge, the hooves of their horses clattering hollowly. Above them, Cellur's lammergeyer was a black speck in the pale blue unclouded sky.
In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminium and magnesium oxides, and snips of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses. The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ochre and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light. A their roots grew great clumps of multifaceted translucer crystal like alien fungi.
Charcoal grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as th column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy sur face of the wa'ter unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foo or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long wicked bodies glittered bold green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining, ephemeral mosquitoes and fluttering moth of april blue and chevrolet cerise.
Over everything hung the heavy, oppressive satench of rotting metal. After an hour, Cromis's mouth was coated with a bitter deposit, and he tasted acids. He found it difficult to speak. While his horse stumbled and slithered beneath him, he gazed about in wonder, and poetry moved in his skull, swift as the jewelled mosquito-hawks over a dark slow current of ancient decay.
Grif drove his men hard, aiming to traverse the marsh in three days: but their beasts were reluctant, confused by prussian blue streams and fragile, organic pink sky. Some refused to move, bracing their legs and trembling, and had to be driven. They 'turned rolling white eyes on their owners, who cursed and sank to their boot-tops in the mud, releasing huge bubbles of acrid gas.
When they emerged from the trees for a short while at about noon, Cromis noticed that the true sky was full of racing, wind-tom grey clouds; and despite its exotic colours, the Metal-salt Marsh was cold.
In the evening of the third day, they reached the shallow waters of Cobaitmere in the Northern reaches of the marsh. They had lost two men and a horse to the shifting sands; a third man had died painfully after drinking from a deceptively clear pool, hs limbs swelling up and turning silver-grey. They were tired and filthy, but pleased with the speed of their progress.