by Tanith Lee
The crossing from Dorthar to the Zakorian port of Loth took a day and a night, and the day had been full of his own hope, his own sense of searching, because he had known at that time that she lived, and he had heard of the wild stories in Koramvis. Astaris had not used poison. Powerful friends had got her away, and where else should she fly but to the secret wilderness of Thaddra, which so often had swallowed up men and their histories. And Raldnor himself had a need of secrecy and hiding.
Kren had financed his passage through obscure routes of Dorthar in the dying glare of eastern summer, and from Dorthar to comparative safety in the west. From Zakoris he would travel over the mountain chain into Thaddra. To Kren his debts were numberless; he would repay them when, and if, he ever could. But he had been made to understand that neither repayment nor guilt were expected of him.
As to what he had lost—a mythical throne, a power he had never dreamed before was his—after the first turmoil, it had seemed unimportant beside that need, that tearing rending need, to find Astaris.
The sun sank, twilight clouded the sea. An hour after twilight he felt the almost imperceptible presence stir and slip softly out of his brain. No violence this time, as with the white-haired girl; this was a quiet, serene death—the black sleep came gently on her, for all it was final. But she left him empty.
And this was what he felt in himself—not anguish or pain or a compulsion to weep. Only emptiness. It seemed that in leaving him, she had taken also his soul.
• • •
Dawn came, and Loth. He left the ship, but no longer with a purpose.
Beyond the harbor was a broad stinking fish market, and threads of cobbled streets slippery with oil; at their back were clamorous jungle and the black treacle of the swamp.
Raldnor sat through the morning in a steamy hovel where wine and meat were sold. Runny-nosed children banged about the place, and two Zakorian soldiers glared silently at their own thoughts.
At noon he joined a caravan of Ottish merchants. They were traveling to Hanassor, the capital, and they made a great noise which somehow dulled the emptiness in him. He was afraid to let them go, to remain in the humid silence of the town, immobile, with his loss.
On the uncertain jungle road they chattered and sent up clouds of birds screaming in alarm.
After three days they took to the bridges and causeways that crossed the swamp. A foul black stench hung in the air, and the colors of the jungle were distorted before his eyes.
The swamp fever fastened on him with a steady and inexorable grip. By the time they had reached Yla he felt so ill, he thought he would die.
He lay in the dark hot inn, and a physician was sent to him—either by one of the Ottites or a Ylian, fearing plague. He was a smelly old skeleton in an animal skin, probably some journeying holy man, but with sharp, bright eyes and teeth. He stared at Raldnor and said: “You were ill not long since. I tell you, the god of death sits on your shoulder and you must shake him off.”
“He’s welcome to me,” Raldnor said, but he drank the poisonous medicine. He thought in any case that he would die in the night, and was glad of it.
He dreamed of the cave temple above Koramvis, but the statue there was no longer of Anackire but of Astaris, a creature of enamels and rubies, with cold, unquickened eyes.
In the morning the fever had left him.
The Ottish caravan had left also, unable to wait on his recovery. So he was trapped at last in his limbo with despair.
He walked about the ramshackle town, stopping at leprous taverns with walls the color of yellow vomit, asking for news of traders going in any direction. Everything he did was the act of a sleepwalker, his relentless searching quite meaningless.
At noon, exhausted, he sat like an old man on a stone bench in the square and watched the Ylians. Soon the square emptied, leaving only the great slices of white heat and black shadow and the monotonous screech of birds from the surrounding jungle. And then came a lone figure on foot, walking in slow easy strides and whistling.
Raldnor observed him—a brass-burned man with shoulder-blade-long black strings of hair—with no interest as he came nearer. A few yards off he came to a sudden halt.
“By all the gods and goddesses—”
Raldnor glanced in his face.
“Raldnor,” the man grinned, showing his salt-white teeth. “Raldnor of Sar.”
“I beg your pardon,” Raldnor said stiffly, “you seem to know me, but I—”
“Yannul the Lan. We served together, you and I, under the yellow fox, Kathaos Am Alisaar. There, you know me now. And I can see that you must be the sick traveler who came with the Ottish caravan. You’ve a look as though the goddesses took you out of the oven before you were properly baked. And some trouble too. Do you still serve Amrek?”
Raldnor shut his eyes and gave the briefest of smiles.
“I should imagine not.”
“Well, we get little enough news of Dorthar in this place. . . . And you look as if you make room for a mug of black beer. Come with me. I know a halfway decent inn—”
Raldnor opened his eyes and looked hard at him.
“Why should you want to share my company, Yannul of Lan? Ryhgon broke your hand at Abissa because of me.”
“As you see,” Yannul said, “he didn’t make a good job of it. I healed. And besides, you paid him back for me in full, I heard. The taverns of Abissa were noisy with it.”
“You heard from the taverns, too, that I became Amrek’s man?”
“So I did. It was a good joke, though I doubt if Kathaos laughed.”
“And now,” Raldnor said, “having exercised my good fortune too far, I’ve fallen from favor utterly. Because of me, a woman has died. The second woman to die because she loved me. And I, Yannul, am an exiled man, without home or hearth. If I were recognized, I should be killed immediately, without trial or any kind of nicety. You should be more careful who you drink with, my friend.”
“In Lan, Raldnor, we judge a man as we find him, not by what he tells us he’s done. I’ll be glad enough to drink with you, but if you find me wanting since last we met, then say so, and I’ll leave you in peace, you Sarish fool.”
• • •
On the flat roof of the inn, under the black awning, it was cooler and almost deserted.
They drank at first in silence, but near the end of the first jug, Yannul told Raldnor what had become of him in Lin Abissa. Wandering about the midnight city streets, sick and delirious, he had finally propped himself against the courtyard door of a house in the merchants’ quarter. Here two girls discovered him—the householder’s wives on their way home from a supper party, as it turned out—and they expressed at once a wish to keep him. He was nursed back to health by a skillful physician, who later informed him that, as a bonus, his master Kathaos had also had him poisoned.
“My iron constitution had luckily expelled the muck along half the gutters of Abissa,” Yannul remarked, “and the old man’s drafts ensured my survival. Don’t let it trouble you. You see I live and breathe.”
As for his hand, the physician had set it faultlessly—at the absent merchant’s expense. The two ladies, it seemed, thought a lot of him, and he soon found himself repaying them by service in their beds. Hearing, however, of his unwitting benefactor’s imminent return, Yannul prudently took his leave.
He secured work on a ship bound for Zakoris, and thereafter labored at various occupations until he took up with an acrobatic troupe. They were of little ability and a quarrelsome disposition, and, having spent a few days with them on the road, he decided to desert in the first town, which turned out to be Yla. Here he toiled at the ledgers of a timber merchant, accruing enough coin to buy a passage to Alisaar. Zakoris was too stern a land for Yannul, though he had no plans as yet to return to his own. But in Alisaar jugglers and body dancers were liked well enough. Besides, he had once known a beau
tiful Alisaarian contortionist. . . .
Raldnor found himself stirred to anger and icy dismay by the first part of the narrative. Further on, he laughed here and there. It surprised him. He had imagined himself in all ways emotionally, if not physically, dead. In turn Yannul did not press for information, and Raldnor told him nothing. His grief, and the burden of his grief were terrible; to relate them would be a superfluous, useless agony. Yet he found he needed Yannul; after all, the anchor of human company dulled his pain.
In the afternoon, Yannul settled his affairs at Yla. The following morning they were on the road to Hanassor and the sea, riding with two or three vendors and a cage of snarling black swamp beasts.
• • •
At a hostel on the road, they heard some news from Dorthar.
Amrek had seemed dead with his faithless bride; now he had left whatever emotional grave had held him. He returned with vigor and determination and set about that burning plan of his adult life—to sweep Vis clean of the sorcerous and defiled race of the Lowlanders. Already the edict had gone out: death to any Plains people inside the limits of Dorthar. His dragons were hard put to it to find them. They had scoured the minor towns and villages for their prey. Only a few remained, and these were the old, the sick and the unthinking. Execution had been haphazard, though total. A casual, ultimately competent butchering.
The twist to the story—what interested the Zakorians in the hostel much more than the Lowland slaughter—was the reaction to it by the King of Xarabiss, old Thann Rashek, sometimes called the Fox. Surely a fox should be more sly?
He had sent word to Amrek that he deplored the act. “Is it your ambition, Amrek, son of Rehdon, to make known your name by a shedding of blood? To begin with the death of my daughter’s daughter, Astaris Am Karmiss, whom you slew without trial or certainty; continuing with the massacre of virgins and babies?”
There had been an answer, too. The storm gods of Dorthar directed Amrek in his holy war—they would no longer brook the scum of the snake goddess. The earthquake which shook Koramvis had been their warning. Indeed, Amrek understood quite well that Xarabiss indulged herself in trade with the Lowlands, which enterprise must instantly cease. As to Rashek’s charge that he slew virgins, the Xarabians could set their minds at rest. There would not have been a single dead girl who could legitimately have claimed that title after capture by the dragon soldiery.
There was some laughter in the hostel over Amrek’s wit, though, on the whole the Zakorians thought him a shallow King, chasing after his phantoms like a peevish child.
To Raldnor, hunched by the murky fire in the cool of the jungle night, the discussion and the mirth came like a far-off baying, a cry of despair carried on the wind out of his past. A new pain pierced the old. He felt the wondrous agony come on him. “My people,” he thought. “My people.” The images crowded close as the chill night: Eraz, his mother, the men and women of his youth, the dragon, too, spitting in the snow, and the soldier who had hunted him through Lin Abissa; last, Anici, white as winter, a pale bone of death. And he had walked at Amrek’s side—Amrek, his brother, the murderer and the madman. And then came the final turn of the knife in him. He had taken that man’s woman. If he had never done so, would Amrek, in the shade of her serenity, have forgotten to wreak his vengeance on the Plains? It came too late, the guilt and the knowledge and the shame.
He saw Yannul looking at him in the red shadows.
“Black news for the Lowlanders,” Yannul said. “Perhaps their snake lady will strike Amrek down.”
“Like her people,” Raldnor said, “she has her teeth, but never uses them. And a thing grows rusty with disuse.”
And remembering how he had lost his naivety and his faith in Abissa when he read of Dorthar’s gods, he half smiled and thought: “And now I have lost everything.”
• • •
Hanassor. The Black Beehive of Zakoris, whose bees were known not for their honey, but their sting.
Built into the conical cliffs, the sea breaking on its lower walls red as wine in the sunset, not a light showing, everything encased, a city like a brain in a black granite skull.
Igur, the old king, was dead, and the brief period of mourning done. Igur’s eldest sons had fought for the throne, as was customary, for Zakoris had not forgotten her heritage of war. Yl had won the contest by breaking his brothers’ backs. He took three hundred wives to his throne with him, and crowned his first queen for slitting the throat, while heavy with his child, of a swamp leopard.
All this they learned at the gate.
It was always night in Hanassor under the rock, always torchlight and shadow.
They ate in a stony inn, where a fire-dancer scorched her gauzy clothes off her body with two spitting brands. There was a blue scar on her thigh. She had been careless once.
They made enquiries of the landlord, who spoke of a ship making for Saardos and offered to direct her captain to their table. Later, a black-burned man with a gold stud winking in his left nostril came and sat by them.
“I’m Drokler, ship lord of Rom’s Daughter. I hear you want to buy a passage to Saardos. I don’t take passengers, as a rule, you understand, excepting slaves.”
They bargained half an hour with him over the cost of their fare. In the end it was settled and a clerk called in to draw up their agreement, this being Zakoris and life and liberty on the whole rather cheap. Drokler could write only his name, but this he did with brutal flourish. They pocketed their deeds, paid off the clerk and sought their beds.
At first light a sailor came to guide them to the cellars of the city, and the great caverns where the ships of Hanassor lay at anchor. The man rowed them through the arching caves, among the frozen, albescent dripping of stalactites, and the dusky flickering forests of spars, into the morning and the wide mouth of the ocean.
Rorn’s Daughter was out, showing herself a tower ship of the western seas, triple oar banks spooning already at the glassy water, her sail bellying on the early wind, bright with the double moon and dragon device of Zakoris.
“She’s a fine thing,” Yannul said.
The sailor only grunted; he was an unenamored man, well used to his wife.
He got them aboard and showed them to their boxlike accommodation in the guts of the tower. They would be eating above in Drokler’s hall, he said, and gave them a sourly congratulatory look before going off about his duties.
Minutes later there came the judder and swerve beneath their feet that told of departure. The oar banks churned, and she sprang out from the bay, a great wooden she-animal, staring with the scarlet eyes painted on her prow.
• • •
It was a pull of fourteen days to Saardos, a leisurely, uneventful voyage, marked by the groaning of timbers and the crack of the sail, the screams of sea birds and the occasional brawls of the sailors, under a sky as clear as painted enamel.
Women worked with the crew, the ship’s prostitutes, for trade did not stop for Zastis. They were a tough, wild lot, willing and able to fight like swamp cats. Their hair was the same bleached-out gray-black as the sailors’ from the scouring of the acid salt winds.
By day Yannul and Raldnor indulged in those immemorial pastimes of the passenger—the book, the dice or the flagon—or walked about the deck. At dusk they ate at Drokler’s table in the tower, along with Jurl the oars master, monosyllabic and mannerless, and Elon, officer of the deck, a quiet unremarkable man, who studied at table a succession of dark-bound, apparently entirely similar manuscripts.
In the night a woman might come stealing to their box. Yannul accepted what was offered him, and with any whose lovemaking proved inartistic, took it on himself to teach them Lannic methods. So Raldnor lay alone through the groaning, spume-sounding nights, listening to these activities of lust. He did not want their women and could not sleep. He took to prowling about the ship in the moonlight. In the moon’s path the w
ater was like milk. He thought of the ruined city on the Plains, the white wolf and the white girl. He felt a kind of drawing exerted on him.
“Where is home? Is this then my home, after all I’ve done to escape it? The Lowlands and the shadow of Amrek’s threat. Why not? I am hated like my land, and believed dead and toothless like my land. Ashne’e, my mother, puts her ghost hand on my brain and turns it to the south. Perhaps, then, not Saardos but the Plains. Perhaps I will go home.”
A day out from the bay of Saardos, Drokler honored the brass Rom god in the prow with a pound of incense.
The blank god mask stared back at them through the pall of sweet blue smoke. It was an ugly rough-hewn thing, without the passion or the delicacy of a Xarabian Yasmis, and with none of the cruel magnificence of the dragon-headed icons of Dorthar. It gazed in myopic stillness out over the long shock of the waves, ignoring their words, their presence, their costly offering.
• • •
A blazing magenta sun sank, apparently steaming, in the sea. Black towers of cumulus clouds were rising in the south, and the heavy pulse of the wind pressed like a hand on the trembling hollowed sail.
The narrow craggy strip of coast which was Alisaar receded into darkness.
At dinner, Jurl was absent from the board.
“Poor weather to make harbor in,” Yannul remarked.
The wind kicked at the ship, and plates slid in their scoops. On their iron chains the low-slung candle wheels clanged dismally, and hot wax dripped.
“Rorn has a bellyache,” Drokler said.
Caught in the high window of the tower, the sky blushed black. The ship, as if sensing the maturing of unseen forces beneath her, leapt like an animal in fear.
“Can you make Saardos in this?”
“Oh, indeed, Lannic gentleman. We run before the wind and use our oars. This place is free of rocks. No need to be alarmed. Eat your meal, or have you lost your appetite?”
Elon rose and put aside his book. He went without a word, and when the door to the deck was opened, the room seemed filled by the plunge of the purple gulf all around them and by sudden lightning.