by Tanith Lee
He was both deaf and dumb. Not physically, that was, but in his mind.
They, the pale-skinned people all about him, could listen to each other’s thoughts, project their own. There was a silent murmuring always about them, like invisible swarms of bees. And he stood, unconscious and mute, on the fringe of their society, a tolerated idiot—outcast, not by them, but by his own deformity.
Outside, above, the white pitcher of the moon poured black night into the sky.
A wolf howled faintly across the distances of the Plains.
Soon it would be cold. Snow would come. Thick stockades would be dragged about the village, and they would be trapped within until the second thaw.
Resolution came on him suddenly. He took from the chest the thick cloak of wolf skin, and from the wall hooks his hunter’s knife and the pouch of small copper counters that was the sum of Eraz’s wealth. He felt like a thief.
There was no one else about in the night. He strode along the straggling earth road, up the slope, by the temple, and away toward the south.
“Where are you going?” he asked himself.
Not to Xarabiss, certainly. Automatically, it seemed, and resentfully he had turned his back on the north.
Something came into his brain.
Somewhere ahead there lay the ruins of a city, a Lowland city, Eraz had said, a relic of a past completely blotted out. Why not there, then, to this hulk of the Shadowless Plains.
He felt insecurity and liberty mingle in a peculiar sensation for, whatever else, he was free. He would not have to endure again and again the same excluding faces; at least now they could be different ones.
And he grinned as he walked, at his pleasureless joke.
• • •
He lived where he could off the wild, shunning the occasional impoverished signs of habitation. He kept toward the south. He became lightheaded at his journey—this sloughing of all responsibility—and the city assumed vast metaphysical proportions.
After about nine or ten days he came to a hovel with an old woman outside it. She was patching a garment, her long colorless hair hanging over her face. He asked her for a drink of water from the well, and then about the city. She pointed without words, southward. So he went on.
“A mirage,” he thought, “a phantom I don’t even see.”
The winds blew very bitter.
He had never been so long alone.
• • •
It was early dusk and there were leafless trees. He came out of them and looked down and saw a shallow valley set in the slopes, already swimming with shadow. And in the valley and the shadow a progression of shapes—runnels, channels, flat projections—like something a child might build out of the rain-moist dust. The City.
He did not believe in it at first. He began to walk down into the valley, expecting at any moment that it would vanish, a trick of the fading light. But it grew more solid and more real. Quarried black Lowland stone like the stone of the temples.
Half a mile away, it occurred to him that no sound came from the city, no light, and not a puff of smoke showed. It was deserted then—quite feasible considering its dilapidation. Still he went on. A great ruinous wall loomed presently above him, and the vault of an open defenseless gate. He went into the gate, and was at once almost overpowered by a sense of enormous age and enigma—the city’s personality.
Beyond the arch a stone terrace led down in broad steps to a dim, shadow-filled square. His boots sounded on the stone, and a purple gust of birds flurried up from the dark into the sky, startling him.
As he crossed the square, there was a flicker of sudden light from under an arch-mouth. A woman with a tallow lamp and hair like the lamp flame was drawing water from a well. She did not look at him. So, there were inhabitants after all, lairing like beasts in the ruins. Well, he too could make a lair.
He walked the cold oppressive streets as the white embers of stars formed in the sky. He saw no other living thing abroad, though bird wings sometimes fluttered on the tops of ancient houses, and now and then he made out a trembling obscure light behind narrow latticed windows.
The moon was rising as he climbed the steps of a dark palace.
Sitting, leaning against a pillar, while the moon splashed white on the cracked mosaic of the floor, he ate the last meager ration of his fire-cooked meat. Shadows slid all about the roofless hall. They were very deceptive. He did not for a long while see that one of them was a man.
“Don’t be alarmed,” the figure said, moving forward into the moonlight, “there’s no need of your knife.”
He was in middle age, wrapped in a ragged but serviceable cloak, and at his heels padded a black velvet beast with glowing eyes.
“Sit, Mauh,” the man said, and the beast sat. “Yes, she is indeed a wolf, but mine since birth and therefore will do you no harm.”
“Then you needn’t fear her harmed,” Raldnor retorted sharply. “I’ve killed wolves often.”
“Yes. So much is evident.”
The man squatted by his animal and looked into Raldnor’s face. Although plainly a Lowlander, his countenance was unusually open, promising to be expressive.
“Your mind is shut to me, and you are dark-skinned,” he remarked after a moment. “Perhaps that’s why you’re here. There are many mixed births in the city. Men with light eyes and dark hair, blonde-haired, black-eyed women.”
“You give sanctuary to misfits, then?” Raldnor said sardonically.
“‘You,’” the man repeated, considering the word. “There is no collective ‘you’ in this place. No Authority. In the temple villages there are the priests, but here—here there is only the city. We are all a scattering, all strangers to each other. Why did you come up here?”
“To eat,” Raldnor said shortly.
“This is the palace of Ashnesea, a princess who ruled before time as we know time. You see bits of her still there in the mosaic on the floor, musing with the goddess.”
Raldnor said nothing. The man troubled him; besides, his days of lonely traveling had made it additionally hard for him to communicate.
“At night,” the man said abruptly, “in the cold months, wild beasts run into the ruins. It would be best if you found some house to hole up in.”
“Thanks for your advice.”
“No thanks are asked, or indeed given, I think.” The man rose and the black wolf rose with him. “My name is Orhvan, and you’re welcome to share our hearth—the hearth, that is, of my little family, my kin by choice not blood.”
Raldnor hovered between embarrassment and reluctance. Yet it would be better to rest in reasonable comfort tonight than roam the city searching for some bleak cranny. He felt at once intolerably weary, as if all the exhaustion of his spontaneous flight had suddenly caught him up.
“Come,” Orhvan said.
“I have some money. I’ll pay for anything I have.”
“Money? Ah, the city doesn’t recognize such things. All is barter here.”
Raldnor got to his feet and let the man Orhvan lead him down the palace stairway, the wolf loping ahead.
• • •
He woke to the clear cold hyacinth sky of late morning from a bewildering welter of dreams. He lay on a firm pallet stuffed with straw, a faded brocade cushion under his head, a generous pile of furs and blankets over him. It took him a moment to remember he was in the house of Orhvan. At least the house Orhvan had appropriated for himself. What ancient family had originally dwelt in these dark impressive rooms and glided up and down that imposing staircase, only She knew.
Raldnor left the bed and began to dress again. The air up here was freezing, coming in through broken shutters and cracks in the ceiling. He recollected that last night there had been a fire below in the grate of the round hall, barley bread to eat and a hot soup. A young man with a gaunt narrow face and deep-set eyes had be
en sitting in the firelight, plaiting baskets. Set aside on a bench was a fine, as yet unpolished carving in light wood of a slender epicene girl. Orhvan had taken it up, remarking on its beauty, and the young man had shaken his head with a half-smile of abnegation.
“This is Ras, who doesn’t understand his own talent. And here’s a symptom of the way we live. We all plait baskets from time to time and exchange them for food and other luxuries.”
Later, as they ate, a whispering movement came from above, little more than the stirring of a large moth.
“Yhaheil,” Orhvan said. “Yhaheil’s father was an Elyrian,” he added with a measured bluntness, “and he has their leaning to astrology. He spends most of his days in the tower room of the house.”
Orhvan had allotted Raldnor this small chamber, and the pallet and coverings had been provided and also the cushion, a product of Xarabiss, Orhvan informed him. Raldnor wondered how it had come here. In the dark on the stairs a shadow brushed by him—Yhaheil? He had only the impression of some creature with an unhuman lisping dream-quality about it, yet he glimpsed dark hair above the dark robe, and was curiously comforted. Perhaps the astrologer also spoke only with his mouth.
Dressed, Raldnor went down the staircase and into the hall. A little albino snake, of the kind that lived in the stone walls of houses, was squinching gracefully under the door in order to sun itself outside. There was no other company. Neither Ras nor Orhvan was here, and he saw that the heap of baskets had vanished with them. There were slices of bread left under a cover on the age-pocked table, and a little pitcher of milk. Raldnor ate and drank sparingly, conscious of the poverty of these people, which seemed worse than, yet strangely not so depressive as, the poverty of the villages—perhaps because they had presumably chosen this warren in preference to field labor.
A fire was still burning in the grate, and he added a few sticks to it. As he was doing this, he became intensely aware of another presence in the hall. He straightened and turned slowly, and found a girl had come in from the street. She carried one of their baskets with a cluster of eggs in it, and Mauh, the black wolf, stood at her heels. He found himself astonished, almost absurdly awe-struck, for she seemed quite unreal, a kind of apparition of pure light, like something cast from milk crystal. She was all whiteness—even her ragged dress seemed caught up and filtered through her glow, and all of her framed by hair like blown and nacreous tinsel.
But she also was startled, almost afraid. She clutched the basket to her.
“Orhvan offered me shelter,” he said to reassure her, wondering if she too were one of Orhvan’s “family of choice.”
She lowered her eyes, saying nothing, and came into the room to set down the eggs on the table. As she passed by him he felt an unmistakable twinge of desire—but it was her rarity he wanted more than her flesh.
“My name is Raldnor. May I ask yours?”
She said something he could not catch, and hesitated at the table lip, not putting down the basket. He came and took the basket out of her hands and set it down.
“Who did you say you were?”
“Anici.”
“That’s a pretty name, and suits you very well.”
“It’s a corruption of Ashnesea,” she whispered, like a nervous yet erudite student, “as is Ashne’e.”
“Oh, really? Well, I like your name the best.”
She blushed at once, and her blush stirred him. He reached out and gently silked a strand of her white hair through his fingers.
“I thought at first you were a ghost. Or a goddess.”
“I must go now,” she said breathlessly.
He saw she was trembling, and this response to him of shy fear, he found, excited him in a most extraordinary way, perhaps simply because it was a response. He slid his arm beneath her head and leaned to her mouth, but in the final moment some sentimental regard for her obvious innocence stayed him, and it was a very chaste brief kiss he delivered to her lips before he let her go. He saw tears in her eyes, nevertheless. The full intention of his body had communicated itself quite clearly. And, with a lazy disdain, he said: “I beg your pardon. You were entirely too much for me.”
She jerked about and fled toward the door, provoking in him at that moment a sort of scornful amusement. And then, without warning, his head reeled and he staggered against the hearth as if drunk. An agony, bright and unbearable, pierced through his skull so that he let out a cry of pain. She halted in the doorway, staring at him, and in that moment he felt his mind touch hers.
Shaken, he leaned against the stone, gazing in her face almost pleadingly, but she had somehow shut him out. Next moment she turned and was gone out the door.
• • •
Orhvan and Ras came back at noon, having bartered all the baskets but three for provisions and a woolen shirt.
“Anici came and brought us eggs,” Orhvan said. “And how is my guest today? Did you see a white-haired girl?”
“Yes,” Raldnor said, but no more. He had sat before the fire a long while, lost in a dazed frustration after she had gone.
“No other visitors, I trust? No. As well. It’s better I deal with the Ommos when he comes.”
They ate some of the food Orhvan had brought, and the wolf gnawed delicately on a bone at Ras’s feet.
“This is how it is,” Orhvan said. “We sometimes take our wares across the border into Xarabiss, to Xarar or Lin Abissa. Ras’s carving fetches a good price, despite his modesty, and Anici is a cunning weaver. The profits are more than useful in the cold months. Now suddenly we find there is a new law—no Lowlander can leave the Plains without a permit signed by a Vis.” Orhvan’s face had, like his tongue, gradually fulfilled its early promise of expressiveness: he frowned. “There is a Vis merchant here in the city, an Ommos with his household. Oh indeed, a curious phenomenon. But, as you will unfortunately see, he uses largess to manipulate the city dwellers, for who has much pride when they’re starving? Now we have to ask him for a permit, in exchange for which he will take a commission on our sale amounting, as I understand it, to over half. I expect his steward today.”
Raldnor felt a stirring of anger, and these first intimations of racial sensitivity were strange to him.
“Why let him exploit you? Can’t the people here band together against him?”
“That isn’t our way, Raldnor. We Lowlanders are a passive breed. You perhaps may not quite be able to accept this.”
“Because of my mother’s blood? Maybe. I don’t dispute the fact that if a man strikes me in the mouth, I’ll strike him back with interest.”
“There you have it,” Orhvan said.
“Possibly it was your philosophy that frightened Anici away. She generally waits for us.”
It was the first thing Ras had said, though he had looked at Raldnor intently from time to time since they had come in. Raldnor met his deep-set shadowy eyes. In the depths of them he thought he glimpsed a love-haunting. With contempt Raldnor said: “She seemed a timid girl. No doubt well taught by example.”
“Anici is a child still,” Ras said quietly.
“And you are ambitious that she remain one.”
Orhvan spread his hands.
“Be still, my friends. You bring discord on my house.”
“I apologize,” Raldnor said stiffly.
“No need, no need,” Orhvan said, but his heart troubled him. “You are Vis,” he thought. “Like the chameleon, you have assumed some of the color of your situation, but under all, you are a dark man with black hair, and a package of lust and anger and arrogance in your soul.” And then he thought with compassion: “Poor boy, poor boy, to be pulled thus two ways at once. There is a look there too, the pain of the blind and dumb.”
“It is the Storm Lord who makes these permits necessary,” he said aloud, deliberately ignoring the brief disturbance in the conversation. “He has no love for the Plains
people. I’m afraid we shall suffer for that.”
“Storm Lord,” Raldnor said, “the Vis High King.”
“Yhaheil says,” Ras murmured, “that he has the scales of a serpent on his arm because a snake frightened his mother as she carried him.” His impenetrable gaze leveled, “and he has, so Yhaheil says, an extra finger on his left hand. An irony you will appreciate, Raldnor.”
Raldnor felt the malice sting him. Before he could answer there came a loud knocking on the street door.
“Orklos,” Orhvan said softly, and rose.
The open door revealed two thin Lowland male children dressed as pages, and behind them the looming figure of the unwelcome visitor. He moved into the room and seemed to fill it up with his scented smell and his well-fed body, and the barbaric-colored cloth of his robe.
“Good day, Orhvan.”
His speech was curiously slurred by his thick Ommos tongue. A ruby glinted in an upper canine. His black eyes rolled languidly toward the unknown face.
“Who?”
“My name is Raldnor.”
“Indeed. I have a message for this house. From my master, Yr Dakan.” He yawned and glanced again at Raldnor. He saw the stunted left finger and pointed at it immediately. “You gave it to a god?”
“No.”
“No. Well, well. In my land it is customary for a man to dedicate something valuable to his gods. Often it is more precious than a finger, hmm?” Orklos turned as if remembering Orhvan. “My message. Tell Orhvan the basketmaker that he is invited to dine at Yr Dakan’s house tomorrow night.”
“Thank your gracious master. But I asked for a permit.”
“So, so. You will not refuse a dinner. The permit will be granted, perhaps, after the food. You are all welcome. The little pale girl also. And this young man too. The hour after sunset.”
Without waiting for an answer, Orklos turned and swayed through the street door, the two pages running after him.
• • •
Through the afternoon Raldnor walked about the streets in the grip of a desolate and panic-ridden anguish. At first he could think only of the girl Anici and how, in that astonishing instant, his mind had seemed open to hers. If only—ah, goddess, if only. Might Anici be the key for him? Yet as a leaden sunset darkened the sky, he began to think again, and with increasing distress, of his foster mother Eraz. He felt, in some irrational way, that he had abandoned her. “I must find her,” he thought and was unsure if it were Anici or Eraz he visualized.