by Tanith Lee
In the cool of evening the girl gave him bread and cheese and watered-down milk. When he had finished, she sat close to him and put her hand on his thigh.
“I’ll be friendly with you, if you like. I’ll do whatever you want if you give me something.”
So, she was whoring to supplement the leanness of the living. He gripped her shoulder roughly.
“Were you lying to me about the travelers?”
“No—no—tomorrow they’ll come.”
“You’d better be speaking the truth.”
He pushed her away and lay down to sleep, the bundle an awkward pillow under his head.
He slept long and deeply, weary to his bones. Near dawn there was a dream.
The Lady of Snakes came out of the hill and slithered down the slope into the hut. She wrapped him in her coils and in her arms and in her spitting glinting snake-hair, and he played with her the games of lust which Ashne’e had taught him.
A fierce needle of sunlight burned on his eyes and woke him; the travelers had come.
“There was rioting and a fire in the city,” one of the men said to him.
Amnorh glanced back toward Koramvis, a toy of white towers between the jut and fall of the hills. He turned away, and for the first time an anguished frustration and a bitter despair ignited in his heart. The Lord Warden had indeed perished beneath Ibron.
“Everything is lost,” he thought. “Only I remain. And I—I no longer exist.”
• • •
The seated Garrison chariot rattled from the Plain Gate of Koramvis in the black hour before dawn. Amun, a charioteer who had once won races in the arenas of Zakoris, bypassed the ways of the riot, yet they heard the distant belling on the wind and smelled the smoke. Liun’s face was set and unreadable, but he muttered: “On occasion a man wishes the gods had made him a rabbit or an ox—anything rather than a man.”
Lomandra held the child close to her, but it made no sound. She felt some dim yet awful presence over the city. “This act will bring its own retribution,” she thought. And she prayed the girl had been dead when the mob came for her, as Ashne’e had told her she would be.
They traveled across Dorthar, arid and golden in the last conflagration of the summer, across the broad river into Ommos, where perfumed pretty boys squealed at the chariot, and the Zarok statues now and then consumed in their furnaces the flesh of unwanted girl children. At a little eating house they saw a fire-dancer strip her flimsy garments from her body with a live brand.
“A symbol,” Lomandra thought. “So it is with my life.”
Yet, as they passed into Xarabiss, the tension and the sourness left her. She felt liberated, almost at peace. As so often before on the journey, she examined the child, and no longer observed it with fear. What would it become? she wondered. Most probably some peasant—hunter or farmer—sweating out its days, unaware of the turmoil and ancestry that had formed it. Or perhaps it would die young. Should she herself keep it, she asked herself now, rear it and give it whatever status and wealth she could acquire? She felt an immediate aversion to the plan. Despite the compassion she experienced, there was the imposition of another’s will, a sort of geas laid on her. This baby was not Xarabic, nor hers. She had no place in her life, whatever that might be, for this curious and terrible stranger. And Ashne’e, it seemed, had known and approved that fact.
The first cold rain of the year came at sunset in Tyrai, about ten miles from the border.
She had fed the child with milk, while the storm beat like birds on the shutters and finally fell quiet. Red slanting strokes of the tumbling sun pierced afterward into the room. A knock came on the door, and when she opened it, Liun stood in the doorway. It was the first time either of the men had come to find her after the day’s traveling. She thought something must have happened and alarm clutched at her pulses.
“Is anything wrong?”
“No, nothing at all. I’m sorry if I made you think so.”
He came into the room with a directness that was at the same time somehow diffident, and crossed to the cot as though this were an excuse for entering.
“A quiet child, thank the gods.”
“Yes, he has always been quiet. As she was.”
“And you,” he said, exactly as Kren had said it, “what of you?”
“I shall make a home in my own land when I’ve done what she asked me.”
“Xarabiss. Yes. You should never have left it.”
“Perhaps not.”
He opened a shutter on the cool red air. Awkwardly he said: “Did you wonder why I was the second man in the chariot?”
“Kren promised me an escort I could trust.”
“I asked to accompany you.”
She looked at him, surprised.
“Why should you do that?”
“I suppose I’d be a fool to suppose you’d understand such a thing. I never dared to speak to you in Koramvis.”
“Speak of what?”
He flushed slightly and smiled without humor, still not looking at her.
“That I desired the Queen’s chief lady. What, after all, was the use? A mere captain existing on army pay.”
A flood of quite unexpected warmth ran through her. Something she had never considered before, she found, had the power to lift her off her feet. She felt like a very young girl, a ghost of herself in Xarabiss. Her hands trembled and she let out an unconsidered sparkling laughter.
“But I have nothing now,” she said.
He looked at her then, his face full of amazement.
“Kren would release me,” he said breathlessly. “I have enough put by to get a villa-farm, to hire men; it could be a good living, here or in Karmiss. But such a life would be horrible to you.”
“Dorthar was horrible to me and the things of Dorthar. Oh, yes, Liun, I could breathe in the life you offer me. And I can get money to help you.”
They were both laughing, unreasonably, happily. He came to her and his eyes were very bright.
“Oh, what am I doing?” she asked herself, but nothing seemed to matter except this strong young man with his bright eyes and the sense of hope that clung about him. He was younger than she, but it was irrelevant suddenly. “You are not a thirteen-year-old virgin to tremble like this,” she thought as a little clumsily, yet gently, he lifted the thick hair back from her cheek and kissed it. How could she have longed for this and not known it?
“Lomandra,” he said, and kissed her mouth not clumsily at all.
The next day they passed through Xarar under a metallic sky. By afternoon the wind was full of dust.
“Storm coming,” Amun said. He spoke little; when he did, it was generally about the weather, the state of the chariot or the animals.
“Do we call a halt, then?” Liun asked.
“There’s a small town, outpost of Xarabiss, a few miles west of the Dragon Gate. I reckon we can make that before the worst of it breaks.”
So they went on, and the two white pillars of the Gate passed behind them, and the roll of the Plains spread out their barren amber flanks under a purple canopy of cloud.
Presently it grew dark. There came a wind like a bolt of black cloth, whipping and screaming across the slopes. Lomandra held the child close to shelter it as whirling grit slashed their faces. They seemed to be driving straight into the mouth of a ravening, spitting, roaring beast.
A pale blue flash hissed overhead. Instantaneously thunder pealed. The animals flung up their heads and pranced with fear. She heard Amun curse them: “Damn half-bred team to dance a pimp to his fancy boy’s couch!”
Another lightning skewered toward the plains. The chariot jounced and rumbled, and the animals careered ahead of it, their manes streaming back in black whips. Amun’s face was fixed with rage as he held to them; he had been used to something better, his whole stance proclaimed, in his rac
ing days.
A copse of dark and ragged trees sprang suddenly up in front of them on the livid skyline.
“Pull their heads round,” Liun shouted.
“Do you think I’m asleep, you puppy?”
In that moment the world cracked open on a white and blazing void.
Lomandra felt a great cold heat rush by her like the breath from a demon’s mouth. She lost all sense of place and of self and seemed to be flying until a wedge of pain slammed into her back.
She discovered herself lying on the ground among drifts of dead leaves, the child at her breast. Her own body had cushioned its fall, but its face had screwed into tears. A white glare came and went on her eyes and then was blotted out as Liun bent over her.
“Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, giving herself no time to think whether she was or not, and he half-lifted her to her feet. She stared about her wildly.
“Lightning,” Liun said brusquely. “It struck the trees and the team. You and I were pitched clear, and the brat.”
“And Amun?”
Liun’s face was set.
“His gods were sleeping.”
Lomandra looked away, unable to bear his stony grief. A dreadful guilt came down on her like the weight of the icy rain which was now pouring over them. She turned a little and made out the shape of the chariot trapped in the black and white flaring mosaic that was the burning trees.
“Don’t look.” He put a hand on her arm almost formally. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way to the town.”
• • •
One slope was very like another in the cloud-sealed darkness. Muddy banks ran up a little way, dripping with sparse wet vegetation, though the rain had stopped. Liun had taken the child from her, but she walked with that other irrational weight fastened to her body.
It was her guilt perhaps which made her unnaturally aware of menace in the gloom. For a long while she quivered with the knowledge and kept silent until at last the sensation became unbearable and uncontainable.
“Liun,” she said softly, “there is something behind us.”
It surprised and strangely pained her when he said: “I think so too. We’ve had company for about a mile.”
He put his free arm about her and did not turn to look back.
“What is it, Liun?”
“Who knows? Perhaps only a dust rat or two.”
The undergrowth was thicker here, steaming with moisture. Through the narrow stems she caught an abrupt and ghastly glimpse of light—a pair of incendiary eyes, first scarlet, then gold. He heard her gasp, but only glanced aside. Casually he said to her: “Take the baby, Lomandra. And get ready to run.”
She took the bundle from him in blind obedience.
“Tell me why.”
“Our admirers are dangerous.”
“What—”
“Tirr,” he said without expression.
She felt the blood abandon her heart and stood paralyzed.
“Then we’re dead.”
“Not inevitably. I can delay them and you can run for your life. A hero’s death. I never thought the gods had marked me down for that.”
“Liun—Liun—”
“No, my darling Lomandra. They haven’t left us the time.”
He pushed her. There was the sound of tearing foliage above, and a shape arrowing down. An awful screeching cry burst from the dark and stench filled her nostrils. She saw the bald flanks, the jutting face and the envenomed claws. A second cry sounded, and a third. Two others anxious not to miss their kill. And—though she knew he must die, this man who had thrown away survival for her, who she might so easily have come to love—she fled.
She ran on in nightmare, feeling death hanging on her heels, and far off, as she ran, she heard a no-longer recognizable voice calling out in agony.
At last she could run no more.
She fell and lay still and waited for a smell of corruption and a rending which did not come. The child whimpered at her breast, demanding milk she could not give.
There was an itching discomfort in her shoulder. Gradually, as she lay there, a dull and numbing ache began to spread across her back and upper arms. A little blood ran down her side. She did not remember a paw striking at her or the penetration of the single claw, but she saw now that her flight had been entirely useless after all.
The Xarabian got to her feet, the child locked in her freezing arms, a cradle of already annihilated flesh.
“You,” she thought, “you.”
But she did not particularly hate the child.
“Where shall I die? Which is the spot where I shall fall down and you at my breasts? And how long will you outlive me in these foul and empty Plains?” And again she thought: “It will die young.” And began to walk toward the moonless horizon.
BOOK TWO
Ruins and Bright Towers
5.
ALL HEAT WAS DRAINING from the year and the sky was like unpolished brass as the ten or so villagers followed Eraz to the temple. She lay on her death bier, very white and still, conforming like any corpse to the pattern expected of it, but her hair was still tawny for she was not beyond her middle years.
A hunter held up the front of the bier. Like all the rest but one, he was quite without expression. No Lowlander reckoned on longevity, for life was hard and mostly fruitless. But the young man who supported the lower poles of the stretcher was staring at the dead face, his own working with the effort not to weep.
It was the bits of amber in her ears. He had seen them gleam so often in and out of her hair; it was perhaps his earliest childhood memory. Now they moved him unbearably, and he did not want to shed tears in the midst of these people. They seldom if ever wept for their dead—he had never seen it. They showed no emotion: no pain, no sorrow and no joy. They. He tasted an old bitterness in his mouth, for though he was in part one of their own, yet he was a stranger and an alien. She had understood, Eraz, his foster mother, and she had given him what demonstrative love she could and such intimations of a locked-up sweetness.
They came into the grove of red trees and up to the black oblong of the temple door. Two priests emerged. They moved like lightless ghosts, one to either end of the bier, and took the poles from the hands of the hunter and the young man. Without a ritual word the priests bore Eraz into the gloom. The villagers stood immobile for a moment, then turned and slowly dispersed. Only the hunter, passing him, murmured: “She is with Her now, Raldnor.”
Raldnor could not speak. He found his eyes were burning and wet and turned his head, and the hunter moved away.
Soon she would be ashes mixed with the soil beyond the temple. Or would the essence of her truly rest in the arms of Anackire? The tears ran scalding down his face and left him oddly purged and empty. He walked away from the temple and began to retrace his steps toward Hamos, the village of his fostering, below the slope.
When he reached the little two-roomed hovel, he pushed the door shut and sat alone in the deepening shade of evening. Before, this place had been his home. Despite all differences and all self-searching, he had never questioned that. But now, now he questioned. Naturally he could stay among them, work in their fields as through the preceding years, hunt with them in the lean times, eventually tie himself to a wife and produce children. So far, from the few casual couplings, there had been no births. As well. They would not want another cripple in their midst.
He got up suddenly and went to the round of polished metal Eraz had used for a mirror and stared in at himself.
Vis.
Vis, for all the light gold eyes and the sun-bleached yellow hair. It was physically apparent in the dark bronze sheen of the skin, the tan which did not fade in the cold months, and also in the strikingly handsome face, the arrogant mouth and jaw that had no place set on a peasant. He was taller, too, than the average Lowland man,
very wide in the shoulders, very long in leg and lean of hip. It was an unmistakable mark on him: this man was at least half-bred from a line of strong forebears who have never starved on the unnourishing acres of the Shadowless Plains.
He said suddenly aloud: “Why was I moved by the death of a woman who wasn’t my mother?”
For his mother had been a Xarabian, he knew. A man of Hamos had found her near dawn, a few miles from the Vis town, Sar, which perhaps had been her destination. A beautiful woman, he said. She lay on her back with the last wisp of moon hanging over her like a drop of milk. There was an oozing tirr scratch on her shoulder and a mewling baby held tight in her arms.
In memory of her they had given him a Sarish name. But she had marked him already. It was her ancestry betrayed him. Yet he had a Lowland father, for his eyes and hair spoke of that. He thought of the woman with disturbed emotions. It must have been a casual Vis mating, for the dark races shunned the Plains people by all accounts. And she had left him a dreadful legacy. Her Vis sex, for one. He, like they, roused irresistibly at the coming of the Red Star. It had been the dreadful shame of his childhood till Eraz had explained it to him. Later it sent him prowling like a wolf through nights of sleepless blind desire when every dream was an unsatisfying frenzy. The girls of the village, unsensual at any season and quite immune to the Star, cost him endless effort, each coition preceded by intolerable seduction. That he gave them pleasure he only knew by the almost grudging soft cries wrung out of them on occasion. He felt they went with him from pity, and were amazed by the effect he produced on them, and every coupling was ultimately soured for him, for it was basically unshared, and he to himself seemed bestial once the Star had faded.
Yet this legacy was not the worst. It was his crippling which was hardest to bear. At the remembrance of it now, here in the dark hovel, he smashed his fist against the metal mirror in senseless anger.