Exile's Gate by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page A

man made a few careful
steps back to take it and the cloth; and wet it and scrubbed. The lines
about the eyes had vanished, washed away with the dirt. It was a
younger face now; tanned face and neck and hands, white flesh
elsewhere, in which ribs and shoulder-blades stood out plainly.

    More of scrubbing, while
small chains of bubbles made serpentines down the rapid current. There
was danger of that being seen downstream. But there was danger of
everything—in this place, in all this unknown world.

    "Come on," Vanye said at last, seeing how Chei's lips had gone blue. "Come on, man—Chei. Let me help you out. Come on, man."

    For a moment he did not
think the man could make it. Chei moved slowly, arms against his body,
movements slowed as if each one had to be planned. The hand that
grasped Vanye's was cold as death. The other carefully, deliberately,
laid the soap and the cloth in the grass.

    Vanye pulled on him, wet
skin slipping in his fingers, got the second hand and drew him up onto
the grass, where Chei might have been content to lie. But he hauled
Chei up again and drew him stumbling as far as the blanket, where he
let him down on his side and quickly wrapped him against the chill of
the wind, head to foot.

    "There," Vanye said.
"There—stay still." He hastened up again, seeing Morgaine standing
halfway down the slope, there by the horses: and recalled a broken
promise. He had left her sight. He was shamefaced a second time as he walked up to speak to her.

    "What is wrong?" she asked, fending off Arrhan's search for tidbits. There was a frown on her face, not for the horse.

    He had turned his back on
their prisoner again. But: "He is too ill to run," Vanye said. "Heaven
knows—" It was not news that would please her. "He is in no condition
to ride—No, do not go down there, this is something a man should see
to. But I will need the other blanket. And my saddlebags."

    She gave him a distressed
look, but she stopped with only a glance toward the man on the bank, a
little tightening of her jaw. "I will bring them down halfway," she
said. "When will he ride?"

    " Two days," he said, trying to hasten the estimate; and thought again of the sores. "Maybe."

    It was a dark thought went
through Morgaine's eyes—was a thought the surface of which he knew how
to read and the depth of which he did not want to know.

    "It is not his planning," he said, finding himself the prisoner's defender.

    "Aye," Morgaine said quietly, angrily and turned and walked uphill after the things he had asked.

    She brought the things he asked back down to him, no happier. "Mind, we have no abundance of anything."

    "We are far from the road," Vanye said. It was the only extenuation of their situation he could think of.

    "Aye," she said again.
There was still anger. It was not at him. She had nothing to say—was in
one of her silences, and it galled him in the one sense and frightened
him in the other, that they were in danger, that he knew her moods, and
her angers, which he had hoped she had laid aside forever. But it was a
fool who hoped that of Morgaine.

    He took what she gave him
and walked back to the bank, and there sat down, a little distance from
their prisoner—sat down, trying to smother his own frustration which,
Heaven knew, he dared not let fly, dared not provoke his liege to some
rashness—some outright and damnably perverse foolishness, he told
himself, of which she was capable. She scowled; she was angry; she did nothing
foolish and needed no advice from him who ought well to know she was
holding her temper very well indeed, Heaven save them from her moods
and her unreasonable furies.

    The focus of her anger knew
nothing of it—was enclosed in his own misery, shivering and trying,
between great tremors of cold and shock, to dry his hair.

    "Give over," he said, and tried to help. Chei would none of it, shivering and recoiling from him.

    "I am sorry," Vanye muttered. "If I had known this, Lord in Heaven,