by Tanith Lee
“I can do nothing,” he cried out, “nothing!” and found that he was weeping. Blindly he took hold of her, but could not bear to touch her hair. “No,” he whispered, “I won’t let you die because of a tradition. I’ll find some way.”
Dimly, as if far off, he felt the soft touch of her hand, the bitter aloe of her consolation, this woman who had betrayed him, who should expect only death in return. And the thought came then of Raldnor, hunted now through Koramvis, the man he had chosen to serve him. Would he die on the knives of the impatient guard, or be left for the rope he had evaded in the garden at Abissa? Amrek kept still a moment, accepting her touch, then drew back.
“I’ll send someone here,” he said. “Go with them. I can offer you nothing but your life. Take nothing with you.”
“Am I to go alone?” she asked.
He felt the armoring of years creep over him.
“Madam,” he said, “don’t ask too much of me. The mob will expect something. Besides, your lover is most probably already dead.”
He did not know if she meant to say more. He turned and left her in the lamplit room. It would be easy after all to cheat the flames and still to lose her. He felt a terrible lightness. He could never have been meant to have her, he had always guessed it; his body, holding back, had known. Now he was returned to a point in time before her coming. He was himself again, the powerful madman, the monster, the cripple. He had reentered his own legend. All he could do now was to live there in the rabid dark.
“I must be true to myself,” he decided.
• • •
Near dawn a man came, a nervous hurrying man, who led her through the lower corridors of the palace, having first wrapped her in a patched and musty cloak.
The gardens were gray and deserted, and a little boat bobbed below the steps at the river’s edge. She passed between two stone dragons to get to it and among half-rotten lilies. There were no guards. There had been no guards at her door.
The sun rose and flooded the Okris with gold as the sweating man rowed them untidily downstream. The white morning city slid by on either bank. She did not ask where they were going. Destination had no meaning for her.
Since their coming together, she had felt Raldnor in her brain, however faintly, always somehow there, not a definite thing, yet conclusive, unobtrusive as a memory. And before ever Amrek came to her, she felt that presence snuff out. There had been death; she had already known it. His Anici had taught her too.
Now she also returned to what she was, that inner core, with all about it the empty vistas of her life. She did not weep. Her sorrow was not separate enough that she could analyze and be moved by it. Sorrow had become her flesh.
The nervous man rowed on, carrying his dangerous cargo. By the banks men were cutting reeds. It was a day like any other.
• • •
Five days passed after it.
With great secrecy, the lord Kathaos, cloaked and reticent, came to the River Garrison on the sixth. The seal he had shown at the gate had been Val Mala’s, but once inside, he pushed back the hood and put the seal away. Certainly the Queen had no notion that he was there.
Kren came in and bowed to him, showing no particular surprise—but then that was not this Dragon Lord’s way, so Kathaos had heard. The man had been a commander in Rehdon’s time, but kept his rank all the years since, which required some cleverness.
“I am honored, lord Councilor, by this visit. My soldier didn’t know you.”
“Yes. Well, we must all employ caution occasionally. The city’s in an uproar.”
“So I heard,” Kren said.
“The Princess Astaris is believed to have taken poison,” Kathaos murmured. “Certainly there’ll be no public execution after all this time, though I gather an effigy was burned yesterday in the lower quarters. The mob are always hungry for a spectacle. They lost the Sarite, too. At your very gates, so I hear.”
“The Queen’s men were impatient and stabbed the man in the back. My own physician saw to him, but it was far too late.”
“And you had the body buried here?” Kathaos allowed himself the most inoffensive of smiles. “Of course. That would be prudent in this heat. I believe the Queen sent someone to inspect the grave.” Kathaos paused. “There’s the strangest rumor abroad, Lord Kren, that the Sarite may still be alive.”
Kren looked him in the face and said with matchless courtesy: “Your lordship is kind to tell me of these unfounded stories. Naturally the rabble will believe anything.”
Kathaos acknowledged the man’s wit. He saw he must fall back, at least in part, on the truth, though it did not please him.
“Shortly before Raldnor was stabbed at your gate, Lord Kren, I received certain information. Would it interest you to know that the Sarite had Lowland blood?”
He saw the change in Kren’s face, and how he mastered it, but it told him altogether too little.
“Lord Kren,” he said, “no doubt you recall Rehdon’s unlucky union with the Plains woman, Ashne’e. The child vanished and was never found. If it had lived, it would have been informative to see how far the Council of Koramvis would have adhered to the law and upheld its claim to the throne of Dorthar.”
Kren did not speak and his expression was schooled.
“I hope that you understand my meaning,” Kathaos said. “Waste is always distressing.”
“Indeed, my lord, but as no doubt you’ve heard, none of us can argue with death.”
As Kathaos rode back across the city, he pondered the conversation. He was unsatisfied, and yet uncertain whether the man was lying to him or not. It seemed, in any event, that Kathaos had lost the game entirely inasmuch as it related to Raldnor. Whatever Kren purposed to do, there would be little detection or hindrance in the Garrison, that inner room of Koramvis. And it was plain besides that he intended no help in other quarters. Yet neither would he spread secrets; he had not kept his position through gossip but because of that persistent strength and cynical integrity so apparent in his person. So, it was finished.
Kathaos, who had grown accustomed to waiting, settled in again to wait. He, too, had been put back into an earlier skin, yet in his case at least the fit was not unkindly. He had lost a game piece, that was all. There would be others.
In the narrow room at the tower’s head, Kren stood looking down at the unconscious man he had saved from death, simply out of a sense of justice. Nearby the physician clattered his instruments, and the girl servant was clearing up after him. He was a competent but messy old man, scrupulously clean with wounds—very few soldiers contracted festering or rot under his care—yet he was villainously untidy, with even a soup stain on his collar.
“How’s your patient today?”
“Rather better. The worst of the fever’s past and the back’s healing well.”
No other than the three in this room knew of Raldnor’s continued existence. The Garrison had seen something buried in a bloody sheet and assumed it to be a man. In a way, Kren was a king here; the soldiers, armorers, cooks, grooms and their women and children lived within these walls as if inside a minute city, and he ruled them in his own fashion, which was one of discipline tailored to human needs. They gave him their fierce loyalty, and so he put a bundle of old rags and goat’s flesh into the earth, not in fear of betrayal, but to protect his people.
As to what the lord Councilor had just told him, that could be shared with no one—except, that was, for the man lying on the bed, for it was obvious to Kren that he could never have known.
The maimed hand had made Kren uneasy, he could not at first think why. When he recalled at last the woman he had helped fly Koramvis and the baby she had taken with her, he had never thought to bring the two together—the man and the unseen child—as one. Until that moment in the room below, when Kathaos Am Alisaar had overreached himself in his machinations.
Now the weight
rested on Kren. It troubled him that soon it would rest more heavily on Raldnor. With an unerring judgment he had already gauged Raldnor’s inner fragility, which bore no relation to his physical strength. And it was indeed a burden for any man to bear, this knowledge of the undisputed past, the impossible frustration of the future. For here was a King who could hope for nothing.
• • •
Raldnor woke in the dark to a girl’s anxious face.
“Lie still,” she whispered at once, although he had not moved at all. “You’re in the River Garrison,” she added, although he had not asked her.
Soon after the physician came. He muttered and seemed pleased with himself. Eventually Raldnor began to question him, for he could remember nothing beyond the moment he had pulled himself from the Okris and into the hovels and the dreadful night. His long sleep had seemed haunted with dim shouts and torches. Now the physician told him why.
“However, you’ve mended well. Though you’ll have a splendid scar to impress your next woman with.”
It was hard now to wait out the captivity of his weakness. As the girl and the old man seemed to know so much, he asked them for news of Astaris. The girl blurted out at once: “Why, she poisoned herself!”
At which the physician took her shoulder and shook her, calling her every foul thing a garrison full of soldiers could have taught him, and perhaps a few more. He had heard the young man mutter a name in his delirium—the name of a scarlet Karmian flower—and guessed at deeper emotions than pure lust. Nevertheless Raldnor only said: “Better than the fire.”
In his mind he felt a curious aching and turning, a search, but not for something dead. With an uncertain prescience he sensed her still alive, but far away as the stars. When they left him, he wept, but more from illness than despair. He experienced a strange mixture of hope and desolation, for he was once more in a limbo of the soul.
Soon there were days when he was sent to sit on the roof of the tower to take the air. It had been put about that the brother of the physician’s girl was visiting her.
He wondered when he would see his benefactor, Kren. And wondered also what the man’s reasons were for giving him life. There was nothing given for nothing, so the Vis had taught him. He was therefore not prepared for Kren.
The wide-shouldered man, long past youth yet obviously still strong of mind and physique, came onto the paved terrace at sun-fall and nodded to him courteously. Raldnor saw a scarred, lined face with unexpected eyes. There was nothing wavering or stupid in them, and nothing masked either.
Raldnor rose, but Kren signaled him back to his chair and sat also.
“Well, sir. It’s very pleasant to see my guest so much better.”
“I owe you my life, my lord. It’s my disgrace I’ve no means to repay you.”
“There you’re wrong. There are a few matters I must talk to you about. It may take a while, so bear with me, and I’ll be well repaid enough.”
Kren poured himself and the young man wine from the jug set between them. He tried to be easy with him, yet he found Raldnor troubled him—too many ghosts sat at his elbow. Kren remembered suddenly how she had drooped before him with her tired unpainted eyes, his poor Lomandra, with the millstone of Val Mala’s infamy on her back. His glance strayed to Raldnor’s severed finger, and he thought incongruously: “It mended well. I never thought it would.”
“Raldnor,” he said, “who was your mother?”
The young man stared at him.
“No, I’ve not gone mad. I asked you to bear with me. Please do so. This will be a difficult conversation at best, but necessary, I assure you.”
Raldnor looked away, his hollow invalid’s eyes burning oddly.
“Then she was a Xarabian—”
“You must hear some talk, Dragon Lord.”
“Please, sir, do me the kindness of dispensing with my rank. We’re cursed with the same title. Yes, I’ve heard about your beginnings—a mother dead in childbirth at Sar, the father dead soon after, then adoption by a widow, your aunt. Is any of this true, or merely a convenient alteration of the facts? No, please, I’m not intending insult. May I propose another version of your story? You were the foundling of Sar, perhaps, but you weren’t born there. Some traveler discovered you as a baby on the Plains outside the town . . . with a Xarabian woman. Was she alive or dead?”
Hoarsely Raldnor answered: “Dead. Your deductions are excellent. A hunter found me in my mother’s cloak.”
“Not deductions merely, Raldnor. I knew your—mother. Her name was Lomandra. She was a court woman and, for a long while, my mistress.” Kren paused, seeing some irony in what he had said. “But, of course, I’m not your father. One of your parents, as you know, was a Lowlander.”
The flaring eyes in front of him seemed to burn upward out of their pits.
“You’re my host, my lord. I can only wonder at your humor. No man can think himself safe when he’s named one of the Plains people.”
“I know that. You see there are no witnesses to what I say. Let me go on and things may become clear. Lomandra had a good reason for taking you from Koramvis. She was making for the Lowlands, and she required my help, because her errand was dangerous. I gave her an escort—two of my captains. One of them loved her; I thought it might bring them luck. She would have sent me word when she was safe; it was her way. No word came. So I detailed a man to track them down through Xarabiss to the Plains. He found the wreck of the chariot and its driver on the Xarabian border, and, some way off, what was left of the other man, although the tirr had picked him fastidiously clean. It was only by chance he found the shallow grave, small enough for a woman. He unearthed her for me, to be sure, and there was no child. I didn’t know then if whoever took you had found her dead or had killed her. As for you, I thought some slave master had carried you off. The caravans go all ways. There seemed no hope of finding you. Besides, I had then my grief for her.”
Raldnor leaned forward and said: “You knew my mother. Who was my father? Do you know that too?”
Kren’s level eyes darkened with their unhidden trouble.
“The gods play some strange tricks on us, Raldnor.”
Overhead the sky was deepening toward dusk, and a flight of birds, catching the last of the invisible sun on silver wings, soared and swooped toward the river. Raldnor was acutely conscious of their passage.
“Raldnor, have you heard of the Lowland temple girl Rehdon took on the night of his death? He put a child in her, though it’s been suggested it was the bastard of the lord Councilor, Amnorh.”
“I’ve heard of her. Ashne’e. The women were always saying they saw her ghost in the Palace of Peace.”
“Raldnor, Ashne’e was your mother, your Lowland mother. Rehdon, the Storm Lord, was your father. Val Mala feared your birth because it threatened her status through her son. She instructed Lomandra to kill you, and she demanded your smallest left finger as the token of your death. Ashne’e cut off the finger while you lived. Lomandra took you to the Xarabian border and died there, so you knew nothing of what you are.” Kren studied the young man’s face but could discern no trace of emotion. There was only that blankness in his eyes which spelled an inner turmoil too frenzied to rise to the physical surface. “It’s the custom of the Vis that the last child conceived of a King is his heir. Amrek was plowed before you. You’re Rehdon’s last child. You are the Storm Lord, Raldnor. And if you leave this Garrison, your own Dragon Guard will hack you to pieces.”
BOOK FOUR
Hell’s Blue Burning Seas
14.
IN THE SUNSET THE mountains were crusts of flame.
After sunset the darkness came slowly, spreading like ink in the crevasses. Once its work was done, the great spires were entirely featureless, except for the distant red dots of hunters’ fires or the occasional eyes of what was hunted.
Each time, as the light went out of the
mountains, some reflected meaning stirred faintly in her mind. But she was mainly dead. Once it occurred to her: “I am a slave.” But this meant, on the whole, very little.
Astaris never wondered if Amrek had planned this fate for her in lieu of the stake. In point of fact, the merchant had taken matters into his own hands.
There had been a cloaked stranger in the market in the dim hour before dawn.
“Are you Bandar the merchant?”
“What if I am?”
“This, if you are,” and the amazing bag of gold was put in his grasp.
“For what am I given this?”
“You’re taking your caravan over the pass to Thaddra, now the trouble’s settled? Well, there’s to be a passenger for you. A court lady. One of the Princess Astaris’s women. A Karmian.”
“For what do I want a passenger to eat my food?”
The cloaked man had shifted a little, and somehow the edge of his cloak slid aside and revealed the silver lightning which was Amrek’s personal blazon. After that, Bandar ceased arguing.
It was a dangerous task, running through the lower ways of the palace, first alone, next with the—court lady. Oh, indeed. He knew well enough who she was once he had seen her hair. At first he had been terrified, his bowels scalded with terror. But once he had her safe away, other emotions came to him. He had heard, by then, the tale of her adultery, for Koramvin gossips had briefly joined his caravan on the road. Bandar and his woman dyed the princess’s hair black in the secrecy of their wagon. The old fool was probably too stupid to guess what was up, but to be sure, he swore her to silence on the name of one of the ten thousand gods she believed in. Bandar knew now exactly what he had in his possession, and it was more than a bag of gold. She was adrift, without a prayer, this Astaris. Whoever had got her safe away—could it truly have been Amrek?—had no claims on her now, and she, she seemed living in a listless dream. Perhaps the shock had unhinged her. At any rate, her looks would fetch a good price in the markets of Thaddra. For want of inspiration, he had renamed her Silukis, after his Iscaian mother, and considered the bitch honored. In any event she answered to it obediently, as if her own name meant nothing to her.