Red Country by Sylvia Kelso Page A

brusqueness always irritated me, but this suggested more than discourtesy; it was nearer information willfully denied. When we were close enough, I resolved, I would explore Beryx’s “Red Castle” for myself.
    * * * * * *
    The road ran within five or six miles of the cluster’s southern side, and we chanced to make a second-night halt near the closest point. I waited till men and beasts were busy with food, then I saddled Vestar and rode casually eastward until a sandhill would mask my approach. I had an idea the Sathellin silence might not stop at words.
    At close quarters the rocks rose sheer from the sand, solid stone masses taller than Asterne, more massive than any human tower, bitten into capes and coves and welded together like the lobes of a liver or brain. It was the last hour of sunset, and the light softened them to the true Helkent color, a kind of liquid, golden-fired cornelian. I rode slowly along, craning up at their summits, wondering if Beryx had indeed come here, and why?
    The other riddles revived. What more did he want to “learn,” what had he already learnt, and from whom? And if he had come back, did he stay? As bones picked clean atop one of those towers? Or—abruptly one of the legends recurred to me, that aedryx lived longer than humankind. Out in Hethria it seemed unnervingly plausible. Perhaps he was watching me from one of those eyries even now.
    Expulsion of this fancy took such effort that I had ridden upon the grass-cove before I noticed. Then I pulled up hard, and jerked Vestar’s head from her eager snatch at the grass.
    It was a broad-mouthed bay set deep amid the domes, and it was all grass, clear up to the bay head: fresh grass, emerald-bright against the rock walls that were now gored with shadow like twilit blood, though the last sun still laid lines of molten gold along their crests. The mare tugged at her bit. I sat staring, hardly able to credit my eyes. Not sand and scattered herbage and scrawny desert trees, but a pelt of grass. Lush, fresh, long grass, so long it was running like grain under the wind.
    Naturally I rode in. There would be a spring to feed this phenomenon, and I was interested to find its site. We made our way up the western wall, and at the bay head I was gratified to find a deep oblique cleft in the rock, with seepage gleams on its stony floor. It struck me that it would be still more interesting to find the spring’s true head.
    Dismounting, I dropped the reins. Vestar instantly began to feed, but I knew she would not go far. I started into the cleft.
    It was longer than it had looked. For what seemed hours I slipped and clawed and scrambled upward, propelled by gathering eagerness, for now it seemed likely I had found the gate into Eskan Helken itself. When a small voice whispered that I might find more than I had bargained for, I ignored it. There was no point in idle imaginings.
    The cleft opened. Red-gold light bathed a little rock cup clearly made by human hands, laid a solid golden sheet upon the contained water, glistered like gold-leaf on the enveloping ferns. The fountainhead. I turned about and gasped, seeing all Hethria laid out below.
    It was a minute or two before I recollected my surroundings, and then it was to recognize a mistake. This was not the actual springhead. I was at the base of a V-shaped pocket which rose to the real battlements of Eskan Helken, a pocket rich in vegetation, even a couple of tall finlythe trees halfway up, and at the very top rose a low mound of yet richer greenery, worked with the tapestry of flowers.
    I climbed up. Hethria lay out below me, a desert metamorphosed by evening to a fairytale red country of gold and liquid fire. But soon its impact faded under that of the pocket itself.
    I am not susceptible to atmospheres—Zathar used to say my hair would lie flat in the cave of Maerdrigg’s kin—but something about that little oasis in the rocks’ ward impressed even my