by Tanith Lee
She did not resist him, but she gave a series of tense nervous shudders, and when he let her go, she began to weep very softly to herself.
“I’m afraid.”
“I won’t hurt you, Anici. I only want you to be happy. I want to share what I feel with you.” And at once he found the stale words again in his mouth from those endless courtships at Hamos—stupid, superficial sentences masking a lust, always impatient, now virtually agonizing. He found he could not bear to drone through those ritualistic phrases again, not with this girl with whom he had mingled thoughts. He moved close to her and began to caress her trembling body. She lay like stone and merely suffered him, and suddenly a rage took hold of him that he could not keep control of. He gripped her shoulders and snarled: “You forever say you love me. I think you lie to me.”
“Oh, Raldnor—you know my mind—how can you say these things—”
“Then you’re a child. They kept you a child in that pile of ghosts and ruins.”
The tears ran down her face and ended his patience. He found he despised her, hated her passive endurance. He felt that urge come on him that was like a possession—the Vis part of his body ravening to be free. He experienced a total loss of will to it.
When her hands came thrusting at him in terror, he held her more cruelly, and his brain was flooded by her frenzied inner cries. But she was no longer anything to him except an object that in some obscure way represented all the frustrations and tortures of his life. He remembered only partly that she was a virgin, and so, while he did not exactly force her, yet it was an effective and bloody rape. And not once did she cry aloud, only inside her mind, and it was these cries that finally brought him to his senses. His horror then at what he had accomplished was the more intense because he himself had done it. For it seemed to have been another man, a man he would hunt out through the byways of the inn and beat to a pulp. He held her and tried to comfort her, appalled by her anguish and her blood. And as he grew more panic-stricken, she faded into an empty and desolate calm.
“What have you done to me?” she eventually asked, the pathetic seal on her poor ignorance so thoroughly wrenched away.
He bathed the hurt and wrapped her in the blankets of the bed, and finally she fell into a dreary sleep.
He did not leave her until near dawn, when he wandered the streets of Sar as the sun rose, feeling as if some sort of murder had been committed in the dark by a man who had been his friend.
• • •
Somehow she kept from the others what he had done to her, but she kept herself from him also. And he found he was like a shamed child in her presence.
They came to Xarar at midday, showed the permit, and sheltered in a dismal eating house from a barrage of hail. The town seemed curiously inert and empty.
As they sat at the trestle over their muddy inexpensive wine, a young man came through the door, shaking hail from his cloak, cursing the weather in a colorful, altogether rather humorous way. He stayed drinking for a while, in a corner by the fire, but Raldnor was aware of his steady, dark, Xarabian gaze, and presently the Xarab rose and, bringing his wine jug with him, came and sat beside them.
“Pardon the intrusion, but I see our friend has served you the worst wine in the house. Permit me.” Whereupon he took up Raldnor’s cup, dashed the contents on the ground and refilled it from the jug. After which he repeated the performance with each of their cups in turn.
“I must protest,” Orhvan said, startled.
“Well, if you must, you must.”
“We’ve no means to repay you,” Orhvan said simply.
“I am already paid, twice over,” said the stranger, kissing Anici’s hand.
They seemed instantly in the young man’s power. He had a sorcerous personality, an indefatigable, oblique sense of fun.
He bought them dinner and they learned his name was Xaros. He was the agent, he said, of a miser in Lin Abissa. He seemed to know that they were not merely sightseers but had wares to sell, and later Orhvan took him to look at the colored cloth and the carvings and the few glazed pots that were their inventory.
“You’ll sell nothing in Xarar,” Xaros decided. “Lin Abissa’s the place.”
“We’ve had trade here before.”
“Haven’t you noticed, my friend, how empty the streets are? I see you Lowlanders get no news on the Plains. The Storm Lord is the guest of Thann Rashek at Abissa, and the whole of Xarabiss has crowded in after him to stare. At Abissa there is endless custom, therefore, from all the holiday-makers. In addition to which, my despicable master will get you a better price if you deal through him.”
“You were on the lookout, then, for Lowland traders,” Raldnor remarked.
“To be frank with you,” Xaros said, “I came to Xarar to visit a lady with whom I am slightly acquainted, at a time when I should have been on my employer’s tiresome and unimaginative errands. If you decide to deal with him, I shall use this as the excuse for my absence. Otherwise it’s the begging bowl and the open road. Don’t think for a moment, however, that I’m trying to influence any decision you might make—”
“What price could your master obtain for our work?”
“Name what you ask independently.”
Orhvan and Ras conferred and produced a sum. Xaros gave a bark of derision.
“No doubt you’re renowned for your charity, but how do you live? You’ll get three times that, even after the swindler has taken his share. And I suspect your permit’s been signed by some filthy Vis thief—some excrement of Sar, or worse, an Ommos. Think how delightful it will be to pay the vileness only the half of your expected profit, and keep the excess yourselves. Don’t be afraid. I make a very fair counterfeit bill of sale.”
• • •
It was a two-day journey to Lin Abissa. Xaros rode in their wagon. He had ridden a coal-black zeeba to Xarar, but subsequently sold it to buy his “lady” a present.
His company lifted all the sense of reserve and gloom from their party. He spread a kind of ubiquitous lightness. Raldnor found he could even be easy with Anici now, and she, beneath Xaros’s deluge of undemanding flattery, began to smile shyly and seem again like a sweet and untroubled child. Raldnor felt a warmth and a gratitude toward Xaros, but also a twisting of remorse inside himself, a pang of realization he refused to admit. The Xarabian’s freedom had been transmitted to him. Now he must ask: Might his true place be here, in Xarabiss, among Xarabians—his roots and all the leanings and cravings of his spirit and flesh? And it was Xaros who spoke it for him, the second night as they sat by the fire.
“The piece of your mother in you feels herself home.”
Raldnor stared at the flames and said: “I’ve lived a Lowlander all my life till now.”
“So the worm lives in the chrysalis till the sun bursts it. Then out pops the brilliant flying insect in amazement and mutters: ‘Well, well, I’ve lived in a chrysalis all my life till now.’”
“Not so easy to discard my father’s half, Xaros.”
“Easier than you think. The Plains breed a gentle and worthy people. Let’s admire them, but be honest. You’re not a Plains man. For one thing, I see you don’t use their mind language.”
Raldnor flinched involuntarily at this new knife piercing of the old wound. Besides, he had always heard the Lowlanders tried to hide their telepathy from the Vis. He said nothing and Xaros let him be. But his own brain took up the discussion and gnawed on it.
The first flakes of snow were feathering down as they rode through the broad red gate of Abissa. The guards, with the dragon woman of Thann Rashek’s emblem on their breasts, made much of the permit, passing it along their hierarchy to a captain, who finally came out and stood in the snow, examining their faces. At last he called to Xaros: “Will you take responsibility for these people?”
“I will. But what need? As you can see, they’re full grown and out o
f diapers.”
The captain cleared his throat and with a stony face waved the wagon on.
“Idiot,” Xaros said. “He fears the Dragon King.”
“The Storm Lord?”
“You have it. It’s well known Amrek hates the Lowlanders. There’s always been the story of the curse on him of a Lowland witch, and a prenatal curse at that.”
“A Lowland witch?”
“A temple girl, reputed to have slain the father—Rehdon—with sexual acrobatics, and then set the malignancy of Anackire on the unborn prince. Truly a woman of many talents—one I would like to have met.”
Something moved uneasily in Raldnor’s mind: A Lowland temple girl—someone had spoken of such a one in the city. Or had he dreamed it?
“And of what nature is the curse?” he asked, partly to divert his own unquiet. “Ras spoke of snake scales.”
“Apt, but unproven. Who knows? It gives mothers something to scare their children with.”
The snow was falling thickly, obscuring the towers and marble vistas of the city, laying on all immobile things an anonymous white pall.
“There’s a reasonable inn hereabouts,” said Xaros, but when they reached it, the inn was full.
It began to grow late. Overhead the oil-fired street torches of Vis cities flared and smoked. There were three more inns, all with the crimson flag at their doors to show they were crammed. There were soldiers in the courtyard of the last. Big braziers burned there, lighting up five or six of them laughing about the porch. They were very tall, wide-shouldered, plated with a bizarre reptilian armor—scale on winking black scale, each a cresset of dull flame—the dragon mail of the Am Dorthar. Cloaks of rust color, sprawled with black dragons, roped in the wind. The crests and mask-pieces of their helms made their faces fabulous. Lizard men.
As the wagon trundled by, one of the dragons glanced their way, the laughter still playing round his lips. Carefully and elaborately, he spat.
Raldnor felt horror take hold of him. He was made to know abruptly his powerlessness, not only before the armor and the spears, but before such unthinking hate. What did that man hate them for? Only because his Overlord hated? Or was it some old primitive fear ready to ferment in all the Vis, merely because of a difference in pigmentation and the stories that had grown up round it?
Raldnor glanced at Xaros. He seemed to have missed the incident. Was that possible? Or was Xaros, too, a potential enemy?
• • •
Finally they found a dilapidated hostel in a narrow alleyway known as Pebble Street. A few Lowlanders sat by the fires in the hall. The dragons did not come here; it was too far from the palace and their King.
Xaros departed into the snow, having arranged to return in the morning with his miser-master’s offer, and they made a drab meal—most provisions in Lin Abissa having gone to feed the Dortharians—and took the creaking stairs to the narrow bedrooms. Raldnor, the old restraint on him again, touched the girl’s hand briefly in the dark and left her, unable to speak. In the night he lay and thought only of her and the thing he had done to her, and regret was mixed now inextricably with lust. Lust was a granite barrier between them. And Anici for her part dreamed confused and terrified dreams of a faceless man with a deformed arm. The talk of Amrek and the curse on him had inflamed ancient horrors, begun when, as a child, she had heard from the old women who drifted with her grandmother about the courts of the bleak palace the brief mentions of his name, his nature and his crippling.
Outside the snow sugared the world with its leveling pallor.
• • •
Xaros came back in the morning.
“My master’s beside himself with voracious joy. Can you take the wagon up Slant Street at noon? He has a hole in the wall in Goldbird Walk.”
Orhvan clearly knew the route.
“Hardly a district for holes in walls, I’d say.”
Xaros dismissed this with a shrug.
“Only one item—keep the wolf pelt back. It’s too good to waste. You can try a furrier later.”
It seemed almost prearranged between them that while Anici remained at the inn, Orhvan and Ras—the Lowlanders—should take the wagon, and Xaros and his part-Xarabian brother, Raldnor, should walk together like citizens. Raldnor found himself obscurely troubled by this, yet he was sick enough of wagon riding, and so it was.
“Our poor friends will take at least twice as long,” Xaros remarked as they reached the broad snow-white streets of the upper quarters. “Half the roads are cordoned off, the rest choked with sightseers. There’s a procession route from the Yasmis’s Temple to the palace—the Storm Lord giving his devotions to the goddess of love and marriage. There’s a betrothal in the air, it seems; Amrek and the Karmian, Astaris. You’ve never heard of her, of course.”
“Never.”
“I thought so. One day the earth will crack in half without the Lowlanders noticing. Well, I’ll enlighten your vile ignorance. Astaris is the daughter of the last king of Karmiss, now deceased, her mother being a Xarabian princess of Thann Rashek’s stable. She’s said—said, mark you—to be the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s been in Xarabiss a year, in her grandfather’s house at Tyrai. She came to Abissa, once, since when I and half the city have been unable to call our hearts or loins our own.”
“So she’s beautiful, then?”
“Superb. Have you ever seen a red-haired Vis woman? Oh, no, you head-in-a-bucket Plains man, you wouldn’t have. Well, they’re pricelessly rare. And this one—a mane the color of rubies. Here comes Lamp Street,” he added. “The law here is the law of the wolves. Smile tiredly at the prostitutes and watch your pockets.”
There was a great noise in Lamp Street when Xaros was spotted. Clearly, he was well known. Villainous-looking bearded men, probably robbers or hill bandits, clapped him on the back and whispered chuckling nefarious anecdotes at his ear; madams blew him kisses and invited him to bring his handsome self and handsome friend inside to give the latest batch of virgins a taste for their trade. At the end of the street a snake dancer from the Zor twisted an amber python around her bronze flesh.
“I see a hungry man,” Xaros said. “Tonight, I think, we’ll visit the Pleasure City.”
Raldnor colored slightly. Xaros said: “My unfortunate Lowlander, transparent lust is the hallmark of the Vis. Give in. Your mother has you by the heels and is roasting you over a slow fire.”
“I’ve no money—only a few copper bits.”
“So, I’ll lend you something. The wolf pelt will make you a good deal or I’m very mistaken. Owe me till then.”
“Anici—” Raldnor began, and stopped.
“Anici’s a delicious child who, like all females, will react favorably to a little competition. Tomorrow you can buy her a dress and some jewelry to ease your conscience and ensure her forgiveness.”
“And Ras and Orhvan?”
“My master’s certain to invite them to his house tonight. He likes to show off his liberality and his furniture, and they’ll get a good dinner—he has a splendid cook despite his other numerous failings.”
They arrived at the shop a little after noon, and it was one of the largest and most elegant in Goldbird Walk. The master himself was portly, alert, and as humorously capricious as his offspring. For Raldnor soon discovered from certain intimate references and wild slanders, and the amazing display of affection between the two of them, that Xaros was his son.
It seemed there was a demand for Lowland craft at the moment, and they did on the whole rather well. The dinner invitation was also forthcoming, though Xaros promptly excluded Raldnor from it, declaring that he did not want all his friends poisoned at one sitting.
Xaros remained at the shop, and Raldnor drove the others back in the wagon via byways. Yet he was in a lighter mood than he had been for many days.
There was an incident to mar all this waiti
ng for him on the road.
Trying to avoid the increasing crowds and at the same time to follow Xaros’s directions, he came finally, by a wrong turn, to the great intersection of the Avenue of Kings. Without understanding any of the geography of Lin Abissa, he saw at once that they were on the brink of the processional route the Storm Lord would be taking.
The wide street, with its flanking statuary and pillared buildings and towers flashing like diamonds against the sky, had been swept clear of snow. Banners drooped from a hundred cornices. Spectators milled about, and the wagon was trapped immediately in the press. Ahead he heard the distant pulse of drums and the wail of horns.
There came a voice suddenly from the crowd, yet not of the crowd—a harsh, commanding, terrible voice: “Get your rubbish off the road, hell blast you.”
Raldnor looked down, his guts lurching with a recognizing fear.
A giant in brazen scales, his helm mask and his scarred coppery face all one. He brought his spear butt sharply against the nearest zeeba’s flank.
With a dry mouth and no possible answer, Raldnor pulled hard on the reins. The wagon began to move backward.
“Hurry! Hurry yourself, you brainless Lowland filth.”
Behind, the crowd scattered, cursing.
The soldier chopped with his hand, signaling a halt.
“Far enough. Now. Let’s see your permit.”
“I don’t carry it,” Raldnor said. Before he could explain that Orhvan had it, the soldier had reached up and dragged him from the box. Raldnor felt the jarring impact of the ground and caught the wheel to steady himself. Next came the soldier’s mailed fist aiming for his mouth.
There was a scream from somewhere, and next minute he found that he had ducked the blow and was facing the Dortharian with his hunter’s knife poised in his hand, ready to kill him through all his armor. Then the bizarre happened. A tangle of people swept between them and the blade was plucked from Raldnor’s fingers. The soldier parted the crowd roughly, but he was smiling.