by Tanith Lee
Despite Ras’s certainty, he seemed to see into her, piercing her brain with pitiless clarity. At last he came toward her, and his nearness made her afraid, as the eyes had done. He lifted the child lightly from her arms.
“Your son,” she repeated. “I never gave him a name, but my women call him Rarnammon. A joke you will no doubt appreciate.”
The baby in his hands awoke now, yet did not cry, and she felt a sudden fierce jealousy run through her and longed to snatch it back from him, and hide it again inside her cloak.
“Unfold the shawl,” she said. “He brings you a gift.”
The tiny gilded box lay on the child’s chest, tied there by a ribbon.
“This?”
He eased up the lid. She caught the glitter of the golden chain inside. The blood stamped in her skull.
Raldnor turned, holding out the box to her.
“Honor me, madam. Take out the chain and put it round my neck.”
“I?” She drew back. “No—”
“An Alisaarian trick,” he said. “A razor edge, lacquered with poison. Kathaos?” He shut the box and set it aside. “The second time, Lyki, you have betrayed me.”
“Don’t kill me,” she cried out. “I had no choice—Kathaos forced me to obey him—Let me live, for the sake of your son, at least—”
“If I were to say to you, Lyki, that I would spare your life on one condition, that condition being that I take your child and rip it open with this sword, you would let me do it, for that is how you are made.”
She shrank away from him. Then, when he held out the child to her, she seized it and buried her face in its shawl.
“Your death would be useless,” he said. “Therefore you shall not die.”
She longed to weep, but her eyes were dry as if the drought had burned them up. She could not look at him anymore.
• • •
Two hours before dawn, Yannul and Xaros, coming from the tent of two sweet-natured women, caught sight of something revolving slowly beneath the high bough of a cibba.
Going nearer, they found a man had hanged himself in the night.
“This is the strange one from Yr Dakan’s house,” Yannul said, “the one with the serpent-hiss name—Ras. Why in the world—?”
“Our traitor, perhaps,” Xaros said.
They cut him down and stowed him out of sight, for since the curious prayer on the slope, the mood of the camp had been too good to have it spoiled.
• • •
An hour before dawn the only coolness of the day lay in the burned gardens of the Storm Palace. Already white haze was forming on the shrunken river where decayed lilies stank, and on the river steps, before the palace temple, a flaccid water thing had crawled and died.
The man, dressed in black scale-plate, paused to look at this before turning aside under the portico.
A film of smoke still drifted in the huge and empty aisle. Amrek stood motionless, staring up at the black marble monsters which dominated the gloom. Their long irrids were slurs of dull radiance, their dragon features a blurred impression of some ancient and untranslatable nightmare, half lit by the cups of spooling flame beneath.
“Have no fear, great ones,” Amrek said softly, “I’m here in observance of tradition, no more. I’ll ask you for nothing, as I know quite well you will give me nothing.”
He thought of the child on the morning of the feast, hacking away his flesh with the agonizing and incompetent knife. Pain and revulsion and terror. That hand, that hand with its layered silver scales, which he had slashed over and over again, screaming out to those black gods to accept his blood, his blood, but let the curse of the serpent goddess be taken from him. The screams had circled in the great roof, echoing, becoming one continuous scream. Then Orhn had come, his mother’s bedfellow, the seal of horror and scorn, and later the scales grew back among the jagged scars.
Amrek touched now at the hand, covered by its black glove, the too-thick last finger held grimly by the dark blue jewel. He had known at eight years how potent was the Lady of Snakes, and how little the gods of Dorthar loved him.
“You have no admiration for the weak,” he said to them.
Their very shadow crushed him, buried him, blotted him out.
He opened his eyes and saw the figure of a woman standing facing him across the great, flagged space. The light was attracted dimly to her exquisitely painted face, and to white glimmering points on her throat and hands. He smelled perfume over the temple musk.
“I forbade you to wear that unguent,” he said.
“Did you, Amrek? I’d forgotten.”
He glanced at the gods.
“So it is. My mother comes before me on the day of the battle, wearing the white face of my enemy. What do you want?”
“I shall need transport and an escort. I intend to leave Koramvis.”
He turned to look at her fully. She was smiling, but her eyes were bright with fear, though she had done her best to hide it from him.
“I require the services of your guard, madam. For a war. I can’t spare you fan bearers.”
“Then I’ll take my women and go alone.”
“By all means. I wish you luck with the mob at the city gates.”
Venom came into her eyes now, and into his. Each saw in the other a likeness of the flesh, none of the soul.
“What poor encouragement to the armies of Koramvis, madam—the Queen flying from the back gate while the lord rides from the front.”
“You!” she spat at him. “A lord! A commander! You weren’t made for war, neither for a throne. You should have been a priest, my son, with nothing to do except raise your arms to the gods and entreat their pity.” She paused, and there was more than spite in her voice. “The Lowlander will kill you, Amrek.”
He felt the blood draining out of his heart, not in horror or surprise, but at the perfection of the portent, coming as it did from her lips.
“Yes, Mother,” he said, “I’ve long been aware that he would be my death. I’ve been evading him. Now circumstances have made it impossible for me to escape. Neither, it appears, can you.”
“You coward! You resign yourself to dying and drag as many down with you as you can.”
“It seems to have turned out an unhappy day after all, Mother, that you lay with Rehdon and conceived me.”
He moved away, but she called out to him in a voice that was abruptly wild and fragile with excitement: “Wait!”
He stopped, his back still to her.
“Well, madam. I wait. For what?”
“To hear the truth from me,” she said.
When he faced her, he saw she had again that look, that look she had worn when she told him that the one woman and the one man he loved, had loved each other in despite of him.
“Whatever it is, then speak it,” he said.
Triumph and alarm lit up her eyes. Her words came quickly, one on top of the other.
“Very well. I will tell you. It was said that Raldnor wasn’t Rehdon’s sowing, but the bastard of Amnorh, his Councilor. But which of us doubts that Raldnor comes from Rehdon’s line? It is you, my son, who bear no impression of the sire.”
His mouth moved stiffly.
“I don’t understand you, madam.”
“Don’t you? I must be more explicit then. Rehdon was afraid of me and could give me no child. Without one, I should eventually have lost my high place in favor of a younger, ostensibly more fertile girl. You’ve always called me a whore. Revel in the proof of it. I took Amnorh into my bed, and, unknowing, he got you on me.” Her eyes went blank with old remembered hate. “And then my royal husband, who had no life in his loins for me, mounted a little white bitch-virgin in the Plains and gave her what should have been mine. Can you estimate the irony, Amrek? You, the fool and the cripple, are Amnorh’s distorted seed. Raldnor, not you,
Raldnor should have been my son.”
She looked at him, and at that moment her years had caught her up. Cheated of everything, she supposed, she also had been given the power to destroy. But his face showed nothing. His eyes were fixed like the eyes of the blind.
He might have been dead already.
24.
FROM THROATS OF RAW bronze the Koramvian trumpets howled—a sound of war unheard in this place for centuries. Every stone of the city answered it. It peeled white layers of birds from their roosts above the Avenue of Rarnammon. Only the clouds kept still—the transparent, shriveled clouds, little flat embryos of unborn rain on an indigo sky that was almost black.
Down the half-empty streets came the soldiers with their drums, rattles and pipes, rank on rank of them; the sun burned on their armored scales, cavalry and chariots, and banners bright as blood. Catapults and other machinery of war passed rumbling on their chains. Men and women peered from windows and galleries, and were heartened. The Lowland magician was outnumbered and greatly outclassed. Here came Amrek’s personal Guard, the white lightning on their cloaks; and there the High King, the Storm Lord in his chariot. Black plate and gold; over that the wide collar and the tall spiked Dragon helm, at which they pointed, as if to remind themselves of Rarnammon, and history itself, which bristled with successful war. A few women flung down garlands, already withered in the heat. Amrek’s face was without expression of any kind, but they noticed mainly his armor. After him came the Zakorians, forgiven now for their indiscretions, striding with their eight-foot maces, and masked in black metal.
At the wide space before the Plain Gate of Koramvis, three bulls were butchered on the marble altar.
Kathaos stood waiting in his armor, his chariot beside Amrek’s. The Lord Councilor had many thoughts to occupy him. He did not know if Lyki had succeeded at her task; it had been a matter of chance, all part of the game, and she, like all the rest, a game piece, one he would not even particularly regret losing. The Council had approved the scheme, though not Amrek—it had been kept from him. If it failed, it would mean little. Confronted by this superior force the Lowlanders could not do much but die, their mercenaries with them. If it had been successful, however, Kathaos would become the hero of the city; it was as simple as that. They still feared the ravages of the pirates, but Dorthar, unleashed, could, they believed, quell such brigands; besides, for this moment, they were the problem of Zakoris and Karmiss, which would perhaps save Dorthar the trouble. Even those who spoke of demons from the sea understood quite well that Raldnor had conjured them—that should he perish, they would perish too. Yes, it was Raldnor they mostly, absurdly feared; his outrageous luck, his reputation and his mother had made him into a figure of ominous brightness.
The last bull bled.
Blue smoke wound upward and whitened on the dark sky.
“And in the coming fight,” Kathaos thought, “if Amrek falls, I carry the Council in my hand.”
He became aware that Amrek was looking at him.
“Where is Kren, my lord?” Kathaos asked immediately. “Do you anticipate the troops of the River Garrison will join us here?”
“I have left Kren to guard the city,” Amrek said. His voice was toneless, empty.
“He has lost hold on life already,” Kathaos thought. “He thinks Raldnor will kill him.”
“But, my lord, there’s some suspicion surrounding Kren. If he were to open the gates to an enemy—”
Amrek’s eyes glittered for a moment with a curious vestige of life.
“You’re blind, Kathaos, as I am. It comforts me to know that.”
• • •
They stood under the molten sun, forming a shape dwarfed by the drought-blackened vastness of the plain.
Above, the Dortharians poured from the gate and spread their shining squares across the slope.
Men laughed and swore. If that were the Lowland army, how had they got so far?
A Zakorian roared: “Does it take a grindstone to squash a flea?”
Yet there came no fresh commands. The great mass of soldiery began to move toward the plain, and, from a rise, the first Dortharian catapult jarred and spat. The gobbet of flame fell wide and set the dry trees immediately alight. Smoke obscured the valley. With a sudden cry the foremost lines of Dortharian cavalry broke ranks and galloped down into the fog. Spears leveled, the foot soldiers ran after and the great chariots juddered at the rear.
Amrek felt the vast spasm of movement sweep him up. He was borne along with it, shouting bright men on every side, into the burning darkness of the orchards.
“Aiyah! Aiyah!” The yelling of the charioteers.
The smoke wrapped black across his face like a woman’s veil.
To his left, abruptly, a man screamed and fell dead, an iron shaft through his neck.
Amrek stared at him.
More fire rushed through the air, lighting up the way ahead. Amrek saw a yellow-haired man come running out of the murk toward him with a masklike face, his sword raised.
“My first Lowlander,” he thought. “The first Lowlander I’ve seen this close.” But no, it was not so. Raldnor had been a Lowlander. Raldnor, his brother. And also—yes, a girl, long ago. A white-haired exquisite girl who had died quite literally at his touch, as if he were the incarnation of her death. As Raldnor would be the incarnation of his own. “This man running at me, this man should be Raldnor, bringing my death,” he thought suddenly, but the face was unknown and the raised sword falling.
A Guard had struck the Lowlander down. He fell under the wheels of the chariot.
• • •
Val Mala’s women scurried about her apartments, shrill-voiced with alarm, gathering up the costly clothes and priceless jewelry.
The Queen sat in her chair, twisting her hands with frustration and fury.
Amrek.
She was consumed by a final hatred of her son, a clawing paroxysm as she recollected everything—how she had carried him in discomfort and ugliness, her beauty subservient to his needs, how she had borne him in indignity and pain, how she had drawn back the birth robes and seen Ashne’e’s mockery irrevocably branded there.
It did not trouble her that she had at last destroyed him. She had never credited him with humanity; it had never been convenient for her to do so.
Today, she imagined, he would die, and after his death she saw the abyss opening in her path. Other sons of other, lower queens might take the throne, and their heads, and the heads of their mothers, she had anointed with her malice since the morning on which she married Rehdon. She visualized what they would do to her once Amrek’s body lay within the Hall of Kings. Already she had tasted the poison on her lips, experienced the stifling velvet pillow pressed to her sleeping face. This city could no longer be her home. She must abandon it as the rabble had done.
Beyond the long windows, the city lay burning and breathless in the coruscating sunlight. There seemed to be no sound in the world save the clamor which was all around her in this room.
Dathnat, the Zakorian, appeared in the arch-mouth.
“As you ordered, a covered carriage waits for you in the court below, madam,” Dathnat said. Her tone, as always, was precise and clipped. It gave Val Mala an uneasy comfort to know that this woman was totally unmoved. The elements of confusion and distress seemed to shrink away from her, afraid themselves that she would find them unacceptable.
“These fools!” Val Mala said. “They can do nothing. They have the wits of lice. Tell them to be quick. Tell them I’ll give them each a flawless jewel if they hurry.”
“As you wish, madam.” Dathnat’s eyes touched hers for a second. Val Mala met in them the hatred that had amused her once and which now sank into her breast like a weight of cold metal. She thought: “I am surrounded by enemies,” and saw no particular justice in it.
A smell of corruption breathed suddenly acr
oss the room. One of the nervous girls let out a shriek. Val Mala turned. The white kalinx stood in the arch. The Queen started; it was like an apparition of death to her.
“Take it away from me!” she cried. “Why isn’t it locked in the court? Which of you fools let it out?”
The women approached cautiously. It snarled at them and crept to Val Mala’s feet, staring with its glazed blue-bubble eyes. It rubbed against her, but she kicked it away.
The kalinx snarled again, aimlessly, showing brown teeth like rotten filberts. It was too old to defend the rags of its existence.
The rheum ran down its bald cheeks like tears.
• • •
The Lowlanders, after all, refused to die.
The Dortharians cursed the running fires and fog of smoke which their own catapults had created. The Lowland troops used the smolder as cover, ambushed out of it small groups of soldiers cut off from the rest and slunk away to hide in it when this work was done.
“They fight like tirr, the bastards. How many have we killed?” the captains demanded of their runners. No one knew. They came across bodies with yellow hair, yet there seemed somehow always more of the enemy among the trees, as if the dead replaced themselves by supernatural means.
“Banaliks come to fill their armor when they fall!”
A Dortharian was found screaming in a burning grove.
He whimpered that he had seen a thing pass—half woman and half snake. He had been drunk before the battle; nevertheless someone clouted him over the head to keep him quiet before the panic spread.
Somewhere, from the slopes, the brazen trumpets bellowed a withdrawal.
Sluggishly, the smoke-blackened, scale-plated men pulled themselves out of the trees, the Zakorians coming grim and orderly behind.
Amrek’s commanders crowded to him.
“Storm Lord, we’ve lost few men. The scum must be crippled, but there’s no way to tell in that trap. If we let the fires spread, we can drive them out into the open on the other side and take them cleanly.”