by Tanith Lee
He made a vow to leave his copper counters on Orhvan’s table and be gone, and then remitted the vow at once.
In the night he lay awake on the pallet and heard the dim dismal wailing of wolves which seemed often very close about the house. He remembered Orhvan’s warning that wild beasts ran into the city in the cold.
“Perhaps she’ll come in the morning, as today. Perhaps. Perhaps,” he could not help hoping.
Finally he left the pallet and went down to the hall. Mauh widened her opal eyes at him from her place by the hearth, and he scratched between her ears, still unable to quench his instinctive reaction to her ancestry. A polite reserve existed between them.
It was not for some time that he realized there was another in the room. As before, it was a faint, moth-soft movement that gave away the presence of Yhaheil the Elyrian.
The man was seated on Ras’s bench, his dark hair falling round a waxen face.
“Raldnor,” he said, and his voice was a whisper that shivered on Raldnor’s spine.
“Yhaheil.”
“I’ve seen strange pathways in the stars on this night. The man who knows fear, who will comfort him?”
Raldnor flinched at the unemphatic doom of the words, but he was also suddenly heavy with sleep.
“Predictions are subject to error,” he said, but Yhaheil ignored him.
“It’s her doing. Ashne’e. She reaches out of time and stirs the world.”
“He’s eccentric or else mad,” Raldnor thought, but was not convinced of this.
Yhaheil went on murmuring. Buzz, buzz. A velvet bee droned round and round in Raldnor’s brain.
“Sometimes a light-haired girl is born with the face of Anackire. For her there is always a destiny. The Storm Lord took her from her temple, mounted her and died. The dragons carried her to their city, which is called Koramvis. She brought forth a child. Whose child? The King’s? Or the Councilor’s? The mob killed her and nothing is known of her child.”
Yhaheil folded his pale hands and was still. He saw that the young man had fallen asleep. What had he spoken of? He could not recall. In Elyr they had wanted to train him in the ways of a mystic, starve him and paint his eyes and feed him incenses so that he would fall down and babble intimately of psychic realms. But Yhaheil had been too swift for them, flying by night across the Elyrian wastes into the land of the Snake, from which his mother had come.
Remembering this, he gathered in his hands certain charts and stole out of the hall and up the stairway to the tower and to his stars, leaving the stranger sleeping below.
• • •
Yr Dakan’s house lay in the upper quarter of the city, a tumble of weather-blackened stone like all the rest, but, unlike all the rest, blazing with light. An alabaster lamp hung over the portico, reflecting on the imported brass gate pillars—shapeless logs to a height of eight feet with, as a capital, the hideous convulsed face of Zarok, the Ommos fire god.
“To that, they sacrifice their children,” Orhvan murmured.
They had all dutifully answered Orklos’s summons—even Raldnor. He felt he did not really know why he was here except, perhaps, that by coming with them he would see the girl once more. As they went through the gates and into the burning vestibule, he watched her walking close beside Ras. It made him angry to see this closeness, angry as the withdrawal of her mind made him, for he was aware of her mind, acutely aware now that she was near to him, yet only in the sense of being conscious of something locked away—a bolted door.
“What are they to each other, those two?” he wondered. Not lovers certainly, even though Ras plainly adored her—or would worship be a more suitable word? And he visualized Ras kneeling at an altar in submissive contentment, never even thinking of touching the image, and another man with dark Vis skin dragging down the white goddess and remaking her into a woman.
An Ommos porter in the vestibule picked his teeth. The ancient stone of the walls had been disfigured with an obscene fresco of Ommish sexual and cannibalistic mores.
Orklos appeared, smiling and heavy-lidded.
“Ah, the Lowland guests. We have been waiting on your arrival.”
He ushered them into the circular hall which was full of the wine-red light of lamps in ruby glass. A Zarok statue towered in the center of the room, a low-banked blare of fire in its open belly.
Orklos sidled to Raldnor’s elbow.
“You gaze on the flame god. It is customary to sacrifice to Zarok, or he may grow angry. It is usually a young woman that we offer him, for in my land, as you may know, they are mostly expendable. But now we are here, we discontinue the practice. The Plains people might find the rite offensive.”
Raldnor discovered himself paling with anger, and only the allegiance he felt he owed Orhvan kept him from violence. He fixed his eyes on nothing and remained silent.
“And Anackire, does not Anackire demand a tribute?”
“Anackire asks nothing because she needs nothing, being everything,” Raldnor said tightly, using a quotation of the temple.
The Ommos laughed gently and shook his head.
“Such undemanding gods.”
There was an obese man in a scarlet robe seated at the low table, already eating and drinking. He snapped his fingers, and Orklos guided Raldnor and also Anici forward to stand before him.
“Like slaves at market,” Raldnor thought, his rage almost unendurable. But in that moment he felt the little tremor of fear that stole from her unguarded mind to his as she stood so close, at last, to him. Not fear of him now but of Dakan. Dakan uttered a low belch and grinned. He was almost bald, and his face and body gave evidence of a hundred debaucheries and misuses. His gelid eyes fastened on Anici, and Raldnor half wished he would reach out and touch the girl, for then he knew his control would entirely snap and he would probably kill the man. But the fatty hands stayed in the plate.
“Welcome, Ralnar. And little Anci.” The Ommos tongue mangled their names in syrup. “You shall sit with me. The young man to my right. And you to my left.”
They were seated, Orhvan and Ras placed opposite and food brought in. Orklos, the steward, moved about stealthily among the Lowland servants, snarling or slapping at them when he considered their work ill done. The Lowland faces were quite blank, but Raldnor wondered what insupportable hardship had brought them to sell their souls.
The dinner was good, doubly good because they were hungry, had always gone without quite enough and were now invited to eat their fill, indeed, to bloat themselves. Through it all, Raldnor was nagged by the question of what payment would be expected.
There was no conversation during the meal. Finally Dakan signaled—another snap of the fingers—and the last dishes were carried out. Two men entered, bearing a semi-opaque bowl on tripodal legs which they set down beside Dakan. Inside the bowl was a dim swirling movement of small water creatures.
Dakan rose, held out a hand. Orklos placed in it a long, thin-bladed knife.
Raldnor tensed with a new and helpless anger. A Lowland man killed animal life only for food or in defense. This live sacrifice, perpetrated before them, was not merely a means of horrifying them but of humiliating them too, for who would protest?
The knife was thrust into the bowl, withdrawn and a speared thing came from the water, doubling and twisting on the blade, and screaming also the screams of a tortured child.
Dakan laughed. He strode to the belly of the flame god and shook his offering into fire. The screams rose and presently stopped.
“My tribute to you, mighty Zarok,” Dakan said, and wiped his knife on his sash.
Orhvan, Ras and Anici were staring at their hands, and Anici’s face was gray. Raldnor rose.
“Lord Dakan, you promised us a permit to cross into Xarabiss,” he said, hard and very cold, noting vaguely that he had included himself in that “us.”
Dakan turned
and looked at him, the smile slipping a little on his pudgy face.
“You speak out of turn, young man.”
“Your servant told us that the permit would be given us. Is he the liar, or are you?”
Dakan’s face fell entirely. His eyes narrowed, yet Raldnor glimpsed a fleeting alarm.
“You shall have your permit. There is no hurry.”
“There’s great hurry. There are wolves in the city by night. The sooner we leave the better.”
Dakan waved a hand.
“Fetch what he asks.”
Raldnor felt his pulses thud with triumph. The man seemed unnerved by him—probably no Lowlander had ever insisted on anything before.
Orklos approached Dakan and handed him a slip of reed paper. Resting it on the table, Dakan added his scrawling signature and the imprint of his seal ring.
“There. It’s done. You may still your impatience. Speak, Orklos.”
Orklos smiled at Raldnor.
“My master offers you all the hospitality of his house tonight.”
So there it was. Secured by wolves in the Ommos’s house, the girl would be prey to any scheme the merchant had in mind for her. His lust was all too obvious. And for that matter, his servant seemed interested in Raldnor himself.
“Our thanks, Dakan,” Raldnor said acidly, “but we’ve abused your hospitality long enough.”
He picked up the permit.
“But these wolves—Orhvan, are you in agreement?”
Orhvan had risen, white-faced.
“I think that I am, Dakan. We’ll thank you, and leave.”
Dakan’s countenance grew very ugly.
“Please do. And remember, if you reach Xarabiss, the terms of this contract. I trust your wolves avoid you.”
They passed through the foyer into the cold black night.
A hand brushed Raldnor’s arm.
“Why go with them?” Orklos hissed from the doorway. “You endeavor to act as one of these Lowland serfs on whom the Vis spit, but you—you have the way of a Vis and a face I have seen on the statues of Rarnammon. What do they offer you, these people? Stagnant ruins, filth, poverty. My master can be generous, I assure you, to my friends.”
Raldnor shrugged off the hand.
“I’m not your friend, Ommos.”
The door thudded shut behind him.
At first they traveled the dark streets in silence, the small lamp Orhvan carried casting an erratic pallid light.
Raldnor, walking a little to the rear, stared at the girl’s silver fountain of hair. The Ommos wine and his victory had made him slightly drunk.
“Perhaps you were too brisk with them, Raldnor,” Ras said eventually, not looking back. “It’s not good to fall foul of Yr Dakan.”
“You’d have preferred to stay then, and have your girlfriend taken into the slug’s bed.”
Ras turned and glanced at him: a look turbulent with unreadable yet disconcerting emotion.
At that moment a wolf howled not twenty yards away. It was a peculiarly resonant sound, too big for the silence of the night.
They froze like a tableau.
“That’s the white one. I know his voice,” Orhvan said softly. “He came last winter and killed five men in the streets.”
Raldnor’s hand slid to the hunter’s knife and pulled it free of his belt. He felt a corrosive scorn for the three in front of him, passive with inevitable despair. He went past them and was in front as the white shape ran suddenly out between two crumbling walls, and paused, its eyes intent on him.
It was hunting alone, then. He was arrested by its unexpected beauty and its colossal size, for this one was two wolves made into one. He had heard hunters’ tales of similar monsters, mutations of strength, but never seen one before. Its massive head would reach as high as his ribs. But such grace it had. He caught the dull calculating flash of its eyes, and its open mouth looked full already of blood.
And then it seemed he toppled into its black primeval brain. Dark, ancient, elemental, a dank forest full of merciless things, steaming swamps and torpid rivers, where sudden sparkling drives and lusts darted and flamed.
It leapt at him, but he had seen the diamond firework of its thought. His hand moved even as its glorious body slammed against him and its stench and insolence choked his throat. He buried the knife to the hilt in the eye of a demon which went immediately out.
He lay then very still beneath the coverlet of the wolf, racked with an abrupt impossible sorrow. Buried by its magnificence, he could only mourn. It was presentiment. There was a sound of distant voices shouting in his head. He opened his eyes and saw the girl Anici kneeling by him on the street, her face a rigid mask of fear for him. He smiled at her and, thrusting aside the corpse of the wolf, sat up and took her hand. “You care for me, then, do you?” he thought, and she hung her head, for there was no longer a bolted door between them and her mind was open for him to invade all the fragile private dusts and dreams inside it. He felt as though he walked on a splintering crystal, entering her mind, and a protective tenderness surged through him.
He got to his feet and, still holding her hand, drew her up also. Then he lifted the dead wolf in his arms and glanced at Orhvan and at Ras.
“Something else to sell in Xarabiss. This pelt should fetch a good price.”
Ras’s face was blank; Orhvan looked at him, wearily nodding. They sensed how he had usurped them.
6.
TO BEGIN WITH HE had turned his back on Xarabiss. Now there was a craving in him to cross the border into Vis lands, to find towns seething with life, and dark-haired women resembling his lost mother. It came on him suddenly, he was not certain why, the day after he had killed the wolf and skinned it of its beauty.
Orhvan took two days hiring a wagon and two zeebas from the lower alleys of the city. Ras and Raldnor fetched the many-colored weaving from Anici’s house, the wreck of a palace haunted by the girl’s grandmother. They left Mauh here also, sniffing after rats among the fallen columns.
The old lady seemed suspicious of Raldnor. She snatched Ras’s sleeve and whispered at him, and Raldnor’s face burned with anger. He followed Anici into the ruinous garden and caught her hand.
“Come with us to Xarabiss.”
“No. I couldn’t leave her alone here.”
“Surely there’s someone else who could look after her, and Mauh would be protection enough.”
She hesitated, her eyes lowered. He sensed a malleable quality and said: “I want very much for you to be with me.”
She looked into his face, and her loveliness and innocence brought his heart into his throat. She was very precious to him; his ability to enter her open mind, the look of love in her eyes, were salves for his bitterness. She was his link with his people. He did not want to lose her even for a month.
“There is a woman in the third house,” she said tentatively.
Later, as Ras and he walked back across the streets, Ras broke his silence to say: “We’ve spoken hard to each other, you and I. I saw the way she looked at you, and I was envious. My fault, Raldnor. I ask for peace between us now, and wish you both happiness.”
Unexpected warmth moved Raldnor. He made his own verbal reparations, after which they were friendly enough, though Ras’s friendship was subdued and reserved, in the manner of the Lowlanders.
• • •
They traveled under blowing dark roofs of skies, and at night ringed the wagon with fires. Once they saw tirr crossing a plateau beneath, and Raldnor felt old implacable hatred rise up in him, thinking of the dead Xarabian woman and that lost finger he surmised they might have bitten off.
They drove most of the day, taking this task in turns, huddling at dusk to eat by the fires. In the dark of the night he would lie awake and listen to Anici’s breathing behind the curtain she stretched midway across the wagon. They were
all too close for him to go to her. He wished there had been more sexual complicity between them, for then it might have been managed. The Vis sex in him was hungry for her, the hunger made more greedy by every day spent in her presence, seeing the look of shy loving in her eyes. Even the sounds of her soft breathing inflamed and curdled in his loins. And yet he had had nothing from her except those gentle and unsatisfying kisses, for she was very timid and nervous—a delicate, difficult pupil of his desire.
On a day of harsh silver light they crossed the border and reached Sar, that small Xarabian town so near to which the Hamos man had found the dead woman and her child.
Their permit was shown at the gate, yet the sentries seemed indifferent, and there were many yellow-haired people moving about the streets. At the town’s center a terrace climbed to a small shrine dedicated to the wind gods who beat about the hill, and near this place they found cheap lodgings.
Raldnor lay on his back in the male dormitory he, Orhvan and Ras had settled for, while two or three prostitutes plied their trade from pallet to pallet. The bestial grunts and mutterings of the Vis about him both sickened and excited him. At last, seeing his companions asleep, he got up and slipped out of the long room, following the narrow corridor to the tiny cell where Anici had been housed.
He thought she might have barred the door, but she had forgotten.
Inside the room he stood a long while looking down at her as she slept. Moon shafts described her body and her drifting hair. He woke her with the softest touch of his mouth, yet she stared at him in fear.
“What is wrong?”
“Nothing, darling Anici. Nothing.”
“Then why are you here?”
Her naivety served only to increase his need. He sat beside her and stroked her cheek, then took her face in his hands and kissed her, no longer with the familiar childlike kiss.