The Time Of The Dark - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,40
gesturing to the mob in the square. As she came close, he dismissed the men in disgust and swung around to face her, regarding her from under colorless brows with eyes as light and cold as polar ice.
"Can you drive?" he demanded.
"A horse?" Gil asked, startled, her mind going to cars.
"I don't mean geese. If you can't drive, will you lead on foot? Or ride the bloody thing. I don't care."
"I can ride," Gil told him, suddenly aware of why she was being asked. "And I don't fear the Dark."
"You're a fool, then." The captain stared down at her, those haughty white-blond brows drawing slightly together as he took in her alien clothes. But he said nothing of it, only turned to call to a grizzle-haired woman in a shabby black uniform. "Seya! Get this one a cart with riding reins." He turned back to Gil. "She'll take care of you." Then, as Gil started to go with Seya, he asked, "Can you fight?"
Gil stopped. "I've never used a sword."
"Then if we're ambushed, for God's sake stay out of the way of those who can." He turned away, calling out orders to someone else, as concise and cold as a hunting cat. The woman Seya came up to Gil, wry amusement on her deeplined face, her sword slapping at her soft booted feet.
"Don't let him fret you," she said, glancing after his slim, retreating figure. "He'd put the High King himself to driving a cart if we were short, with never a by-your-leave. There, look."
Gil followed the gesture of the woman's hand and saw Janus and Ingold standing in the middle of the ruckus at the foot of the steps, surrounded by quarreling drivers, gesturing Guards, and rickety carts. The tall captain was talking to them, gazing down the length of his aristocratic nose. Janus looked shocked, Ingold amused. The wizard swung himself up into the nearest cart, settled down on the driver's seat, and gathered the reins into his hands as deftly as a coachman.
The sun cleared the spiky peaks in the east as they were leaving the last houses of Karst behind them, brightening the scene without dispersing the white mist lying so thickly among the trees. Gil was mounted uncomfortably on the narrow harness-saddle of a fat roan, drawing a cart close to the head of the convoy. She could see that most of the vehicles in town had been commandeered, far more than could be provided with civilian drivers who were willing to return to the haunted city of Gae. Many were driven by Guards, and a thin, straggling line of them walked on either side of the train-men and women both, she saw, mostly young, though there were gray or balding heads visible up and down the line as well. They moved restlessly, and she could see the marks of strain and exhaustion clearly on their faces. These were the fighters who had borne the brunt of the defense of Gae.
As the light grew, Gil could make out little camps of refugees in the woods, straggling out along the road and far back among the trees. There were refugees on the road, too, men and women in wrinkled and dirty clothes, carrying awkward bundles of blankets and cooking pots on their backs, pushing makeshift wheelbarrows, or dragging crude travois. Now and then a man would be leading a donkey, or a woman drawing an unwilling cow at the end of a rope. Mostly they did not stop and gave only scant attention to the winding file of carts and their ragged line of escorts. They were too weary with flight and fear to have any thought but for the refuge ahead.
Eventually, the road dipped and bent. Beyond the thin screen of brown-leaved trees, Gil felt the wind freshen and change. She looked up to see the land fall away on one side of the road, to show her the city of Gae.
Recognition caught at her heart. It lay in the distance, surrounded by its many walls, held in the crook of the river's arm, facing out across a plain turned tawny gold with autumn and latticed with the white of the city roads. It was almost as if she had lived there, walked those close-angled streets, and known from childhood that skyline of turrets and branches. Against the morning sky, six spires of stone rose up, flying buttresses bereft of the walls they had supported, stretching like the bony fingers of a skeleton hand into