by Tanith Lee
• • •
There were evenings, nights, dawns, other twilights and suns rising. He grew accustomed to Xaros’s elegant rooms as he sat in them, eaten alive by a mindless, creeping lethargy.
After three or four days Orhvan had come, his expressive face showing now only a hesitant empty sorrow.
“Raldnor—the thaw will begin in a little while. Tomorrow even, or the day after, perhaps. Then we’ll be setting out for the Plains.”
Raldnor said nothing at first, but Orhvan stared at him as mutely, and finally he said: “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because we have to go now—before the second snow. You understand that traveling becomes impossible after that.”
“Why are you telling me?” Raldnor repeated, “I’m not going with you.”
“You’ve no choice. Oh, Raldnor, you have to come with us. Haven’t you seen what’s beginning here—Amrek’s work? Even the Xarabians have begun to hate and fear us. Every day there are men in the market places and squares, muttering about Lowland perversions and sorceries . . . You have to come—”
“No, Orhvan. You thought of me always as a Vis. And I am Vis. She—she might have altered me, molded me to be a Lowlander like you, if she’d been stronger and more able than she was. And you don’t have to reproach me for those words. I comprehend perfectly every atom of my guilt.”
He felt then the lightest touch against his thoughts, as if the mind of Orhvan, like hers, had brushed against his own through the crippling veil.
“Come to the Plains when you can,” Orhvan said, “when things are better for you. You know you’d be welcome—”
Raldnor shook his head. With unsmiling lacerated amusement, he said: “Don’t ask the thief and murderer back into your house, Orhvan. He might steal and butcher some more.”
Orhvan lowered his head and turned, and left him.
After this Raldnor had only two visitors. One was the Xarabian woman on whose unknown breast he had wept. He had expected at first, confronted with her in the aftermath of this hysteria, to be embarrassed and ill at ease, but in her gentle courteous way she somehow made him able to accept his own actions. It seemed she was Xaros’s mistress, though she lived in her own apartments somewhere in the building. She was always very quiet, yet her presence was unutterably soothing to Raldnor. She would bring him things to eat or occasionally read to him in a cool lilting voice. Her name was Helida, and her interest a maternal rather than an amatory one, for clearly she loved Xaros a great deal in her own reserved and essentially sophisticated fashion.
The other, second visitor was less welcome; she came in the night and crumbled across his dreams in the consuming fire of her burial. He began to dread sleep. Orhvan had left the wolf pelt when he came, and sometimes in the dark the glimmer of its whiteness seemed like her hair across his bed. Her very innocence had grown evil with the haunting.
• • •
Immured in the apartment building, he heard nothing of the city outside. Even Orhvan’s ominous despair had had no impact on him, and, besides, alienated from his people as always and for the first time befriended by a Vis, he felt himself truly Xarabian and one with the crowd of Lin Abissa.
Yet on the eighth evening of his lethargy, a boy came running up the stairs and pounded on Xaros’s door.
“What’s this, you hooligan?” Xaros demanded, and Raldnor thought he recognized the child as the son of the landlord and his wife, who lived a flight down.
“Xaros—soldiers—Dortharians—”
“Certainly. Get your breath back.”
The boy gasped a little, swallowed and resumed:
“Svarl saw Dortharian soldiers on Slant Street, asking for a Lowland man with a finger missing on his left hand. He told me to tell you someone directed them here.”
Xaros gave the boy a coin and packed him off; then, turning to Helida, he said: “Sweetheart, go and appropriate old Solfina’s hair dye,” and Helida went out, presumably to obey this curious order, without a word.
“I’ll leave at once,” Raldnor said, starting up in a sort of sick madness of action.
“And meet the dragons on the street? Oh, no, my impetuous friend. From this moment you’ll do exactly as I say. Oh, my darling Helida, how swift of you. Now we’ll make this yellow stuff a respectable color.”
Raldnor protested as Xaros plastered the jet black paste onto his hair, and Helida applied jugfuls of barely warm water.
“He struggles like an eel. Keep still while I attend to your eyebrows.”
“Will this paint wash off?” Raldnor demanded, stunned and made almost submissive by indignity.
“Wash off? Gods and goddesses—Do you suppose all the elderly black-haired ladies you see in the street would pay out their funds to be unmasked by the first rain?”
They toweled his hair before the fire.
“A rough imperfect job of work,” Xaros commented. “Now into your bed, under the covers and shut your eyes. It’s true certain Dortharians have yellow eyes—their famous king Rarnammon for one—but I can hardly pass you off as him. And say nothing, though an occasional groan I will allow you.”
At which moment, new and heavier footfalls, the unmistakable sound of mail, clashed on the stairs.
The imperative knock came seconds later. Xaros opened the door and feigned amazement.
“To what do I owe this honor?”
“No honor, Xarab. You’ve a man here—”
“Why, yes. How singularly clever of you to know—”
“A Lowlander.”
Xaros raised his eyebrows.
“Indeed no, soldier. I spit on such scum.”
“Oh yes? Then who’s the man?”
“My brother, sir. Prey to a strange affliction; the physician is entirely baffled.”
The two Dortharians thrust by him and flung open the door of the second room. They saw a dark-haired man, apparently asleep in the bed, and a Xarabian woman drooped at the bedside in an attitude of weary despair.
“I must beg you, sir, not to disturb the poor fellow. Additionally,” Xaros muttered with pathos, “the fever is highly contagious.”
The soldier nearest the bed checked his stride.
“Have you reported his sickness to the authorities?”
“Naturally, sir,” Xaros murmured.
“Damnation,” snarled the Dortharian in the doorway. “You were born of a lying race, Xarab. I’ll skin those rats in Slant Street if I catch them.”
“Liars abound,” Xaros remarked sententiously.
The two men pushed their way past.
“What had the Lowlander done to displease you, magnificent sir?”
“That’s my affair. I owe him something.”
Xaros ushered them out and called solicitously after them to mind their step on the lower stairs, then shut the door—and leaned thereon in the helpless mirth of self-applause.
“I’m in your debt for my life,” Raldnor said. It had been easy enough to feign illness in that room, so close to a piece of death.
“So you are. But, more to the point, don’t you think, Helida, that he makes a remarkably good Vis?”
And later, when Raldnor stared at himself in Helida’s glass, another man looked back at him. Something irreparable had occurred—it stretched quite beyond the incident. For it seemed to him he was no longer Raldnor, certainly no longer the Raldnor he had known. And the planes of his face were comfortable and apt, their hauteur set now in this darkness. He seemed to discover himself for what he was. “I am easy with this stranger,” he thought. “He never knew the crippling of a deaf mind, nor the unwilling Lowland girls; not even the white crystal girl of the Lowlander’s sleep. I am Vis now, truly Vis. Is this the legacy my mother intended? Out of an old whore’s dye bottle?”
• • •
He took up the wolf pelt in the morni
ng and went out to sell it. The streets ran with the rain of the thaw, but he did not think of Orhvan’s wagon negotiating the unfriendly mud, nor of the ruined city; in a way he had renounced them. And he walked arrogantly, unafraid. Since he had seen the Dortharian soldier spit from the courtyard after them, a hidden part of him had been uneasy to move about these streets, though he had not owned this.
Yet near the furriers Xaros had recommended, he passed across the Red Market and saw five women up for sale to the whorehouses.
Four were pert faced and untroubled enough, flirting with the crowd—black-haired tarts already from the look of them. The fifth was a Lowland woman, dressed in a coarse shift.
Raldnor stared at that familiar and unreadable face he knew so well from the villages. And then, incredibly, it seemed their minds touched, for her head jerked up and she scanned the crowd. Yet he was not strong or adept enough to hold their accidental contact; he did not know how. And she, seeing only dark men about her, relapsed into gray immobility.
Yet the mob, mostly louts with some Ommos and Dortharian men among them, began to jeer at her.
“Looking for me, you yellow mare? I’ll ride you!”
Sudden cold fear dropped over Raldnor. He began to shiver. With an impulse of agonized cowardice, he turned and pushed a way across the square.
He reached the furriers with a sense of horror still on him.
The shop was lofty and dim, and smelled of its wares. He snatched up a handbell and rang it sharply, and the merchant emerged like a shade from a crevice in the wall.
“My lord?” His voice was oddly fawning, unctuous. Raldnor was marvelously surprised to be addressed in such a voice.
“This,” he said; he opened the cloth and spread the pelt on the counter in a spool of icy flame.
The merchant betrayed himself with a sharp intake of breath. Then, mastering himself, he said: “A fine skin. Indeed yes. You bleached it?”
“I didn’t touch it. This was a white wolf.”
The merchant gave a little laugh, as if amused by a favorite child.
“Ah, my lord. A wolf pelt of this size, and so white?”
“If you’ve no taste for my goods, I’ll go elsewhere.”
“Wait, my lord—indeed—you’re too hasty. Possibly it’s as you say. But I’ve no recollection of a hunter trapping such a thing for years.”
“Not trapped. Pierced through the eye. The pelt’s unmarked.”
The merchant hastily examined the hide, then, shaking his head, he murmured: “Of course, it would be difficult to sell so large an article, the times being what they are. I could offer you fifteen ankars in gold.”
“Offer me thirty,” Raldnor said, well instructed by Xaros and inflamed by loathing to boot.
“He deserves more for his impertinence alone,” a new voice said.
Raldnor turned and saw a man had come out of the hole in the wall. He was a Dortharian, there was no mistaking it, yet he did not wear the dragon mail. He leaned on the counter, looking at Raldnor.
“You should have called me sooner, merchant.” The merchant began to speak, but the newcomer overrode him. “Tell me, where did you kill your wolf?”
Cautiously Raldnor assessed his own words.
“In the Plains.”
“The Plains? A long way surely from home? You’re from the cities of Dorthar, are you not?”
This ghastly irony brought the blood singing to Raldnor’s ears.
“I’m no Dortharian.”
“How quickly you disclaim the High Race of Vis. Where then?”
“I come from Sar,” Raldnor said, “near the Dragon Gate.”
It was where his mother had been making for, so his foster village had thought, thus it carried a kind of truth.
“Sar, eh? And the wolf, where did he come from?”
“Out of the dark, on to my knife.”
The man laughed.
“Fifty gold ankars for that pelt, merchant.” The merchant gobbled. “But you’re too late. My master will buy it. It’s better than anything you showed me. Come aside.” And he drew Raldnor into the dusky twilight of the shop—the merchant, for some reason intimidated, not following. “Well, hunter, so you can kill wolves. Ever killed a man?”
Raldnor stared at him in silence.
“Oh, it’s a good trade, the trade of soldiering. Your mother was Xarabian, was she? Know your father, do you?”
“You insult me,” Raldnor said coldly, a burning nausea in his throat before he knew the reason.
“Not I. Your father was a Dortharian for my money. And that, lad, is a compliment. Well, would you like to soldier for an exceptionally generous lord who holds a high place in Koramvis?”
“Why should I want such a thing?”
“Why indeed? Why not scratch out a life in Sar?”
“Who is this lord?”
“You go too fast. Take this and spend it, and think about spending such a sum more regularly in Dorthar. Return here tomorrow at noon. We’ll talk then.”
Raldnor took the bulging money bag, opened it and saw the gold pieces shining up at him. He felt once more a shifting in the planes of his life.
“You’re very sure of me, Dortharian.”
“That’s how I earn my gold. By my unerring sense of a willing quarry.”
Raldnor turned and walked between the heaps of furs, leaving the pelt for the stranger who had bought it. At the door he heard the Dortharian call after him: “Noon, hunter. I’ll be waiting.”
Outside the rain still ran in the gutters, but a dark shadow of change covered the landscape. Raldnor considered: “I’ll go back. Why? A soldier in their corrupt armies. I, the impostor, Lowland scum. And Dorthar—that reeking tomb of dead kings. What’s that dragon place to me?”
8.
SHE RODE INTO LIN ABISSA, her grandfather’s capital, on the back of a rust red monster.
She and it were a dual thing of fire in the white afternoon, the apex of a procession made up of gaudy acrobats, fantastic dancers and incredible creatures dressed to resemble Xarabian legend. Amrek’s betrothed was piped, sung and magicked through the streets like a goddess from an era before time.
The beast that carried her was a giant palutorvus from the steamy swamps of Zakoris. She sat in a golden contraption with a roof of plumes. She wore a dull red gown, trimmed with chestnut fur and cut low in the neck, an orange jewel clenched between her breasts. From a tower of golden flowers at her skull fell a smoky drift of scarlet veil. Her hair was the precise color of blood.
The crowds murmured and craned up to see her. And, as with all things flawless, she seemed unreal. Instinctively they searched her person for humanity, some hint of dross, but this was a salamander beauty, burning, mythological, unbounded by any laws or levelings.
She rode without a glance to either side. She was an image of herself.
• • •
The procession halted on the avenue before the palace portico, and the red beast knelt.
A man took Astaris’s hand as she stepped from her gilded ladder of steps and bowed low.
“Madam, I welcome your grace to the Storm Lord’s court at Lin Abissa. I am the Lord Amrek’s Councilor, Kathaos. Account me your slave.” His voice was slightly slurred with the accent denoting Ommos or Zakorian, yet the triple-tailed dragon of Alisaar was the emblem on his robe.
She said nothing to his courtesy, and, meeting her eyes, he had the impression of endless depths of beautiful opacity.
Amrek waited for her on the palace steps in order that the crowds at the gates should get some oblique glimpses of their meeting. Kathaos led her to the King and stepped aside. The woman was confronted by the man who was to be, from this moment, her lord.
He was dark and cruel in his exterior, like an emblem of himself and his reputation. He leaned toward her and placed on her lips the tradi
tional kiss of greeting that marked his approval.
Her mouth was very cool, and she seemed to wear no perfume, despite her finery, as if she were merely a doll that had allowed itself to be dressed. Something about her angered him. He was subject to such angers. Ostentatiously ignoring his Councilor, whom he hated for many various reasons, he took her hand roughly and pulled her into the palace with him. She made no complaint.
“Madam, I am unaccustomed to dangling women on my arm. I walk too fast for you, I think.”
“If you think so, you should walk more slowly,” she said. Her remark had a combination of insolence and wit, yet he sensed that both were somehow accidental. She had simply made a statement.
“So you have a tongue. I thought the swamp beast had bitten it out.”
They came into a huge room, the retinue left behind. He moved her to look about at things.
“Do you know what happened in this room, Astaris Am Karmiss? A woman died here because of her fear of me.”
“Did it pain you that she died?”
“Pain? No, she was a Lowland whore. Nothing. Don’t you want to know why she feared me? It was this—this gauntlet. But you, Astaris, have no need to fear it. I wear the glove to hide a knife scar—not a beautiful thing.”
“What is beauty?” she said.
Her curious responses disturbed him, and she also, this impossible jewel cast into his gloomy life to blaze there like a comet.
“You, Astaris, are beautiful,” he said.
“Yes, but I’m not a measure.”
He let go her hand.
“Were you afraid on the monster’s back? You must blame Kathaos if you were. His ideas become a village circus-master.”
“What should I fear?”
“Perhaps, despite what I said to you, you should fear me a little.”
“Why?”
“Why? I am the High King, more, I am her son—the bitch queen of Koramvis. I inherit all her foulness and her cruelty. And now I am to be your lord. While you please me, you’ll be safe enough. But not when I lose interest—unsurpassable loveliness might evoke boredom after a time, even yours. Especially yours. Your perfect symmetry will grate, madam.”