by Tanith Lee
She struggled between his hands, then ceased to struggle. She lowered now not merely her eyes but her head.
“It isn’t that you want me,” she said, “but only that you must have me. Everything you desire you must possess.”
“I’ve little enough. A title that means nothing. A cupboard euphemistically called a room in the lower palace. A strip of land at Xai that yields nothing but rotten gourds and diseases. But if you’d stay, I might wrest something from the rubbish. For both of us.”
“I only want peace.”
“Which is to be had away from me?”
She looked up again and into his eyes.
“Yes.”
“And in a few nights, Zastis will be burning in the sky. What then? You’re not white enough or yellow enough, my half-breed sister, to ignore the Red Moon.”
“There are disciplines practiced in Ankabek, learned from Lowland temple lore—”
“And none of them so effective as a man against you in the sheets. You’ve had Zastis lovers, Val Nardia, if never the one you truly wanted.”
She wrenched away from him at last, and he laughed softly, his face now full of contemptuous dislike.
“No,” she said, “you’ve never been able to commit that wrong, at least.”
“But you think finally I shall force you? Is that why you’re running away?”
“Yes, then, if you must have it. Running from you. Oh, not simply your lusts, your demands. From everything you are. Your corrupt dreams, your plans, your clever brain fermenting into a sewer—”
He caught her by the hair this time and pulled her sharply against him. Her slanders were cut short as he brought his mouth down on hers.
At first she grit her teeth to keep him out, but he had also cut off her breath. Soon her lips parted to gain air. The tingle of Zastis was already apparent to those susceptible. He felt her trembling tension alter, and suddenly her hands were locked across his back. For a lengthy swiftness of moments he swam strongly in the fragrant coolness of her mouth, in the pleasure of her own strength answering his, the narrow hands fierce on him. Then her struggles abruptly began again. She pushed at him, clawed at him, and he stepped away, drunk on her and dazzled.
To his bemused, amused, furious surprise she had snatched up a little fruit knife from a table.
“Get out,” she said. Her voice was no more than a cough, but the tiny blade glinted.
Kesarh turned. He retraced his steps to the door, paused, and glanced back at her. At once she raised the knife, poising it to be thrown.
“Farewell, gentle sister,” he said. “Remember me in the hot crimson nights, alone on your religious mattress.”
Only when the door had closed on him did Val Nardia carefully replace the knife beside the fruit. It required care, since she could see nothing now for her tears.
• • •
In the stony under-palace, Kesarh’s guard sergeant surveyed a covered court, and the long post at its center, thumbs hooked in his belt.
“Yes, that’s his way, our Lord Kesarh. To send you on your own authority. You’re not the first by any means, soldier. Nor won’t be the last. Too much beer, was it? Or too much of the other thing?”
The Karmian guardsman—he had given his name a year ago as Rem—said nothing. The sergeant did not expect him to. With ten lashes in the offing from the prescribed whip, known among the men as Biter, few saw anything to joke or intellectualize over.
Kesarh had ten private guard, the permitted number for a prince of his lowly lights, a by-blow, with the royalty and the elite yellow-man’s blood in different parents. The bastards of the conqueror Shansar king and his brothers did much better. Kesarh’s ten men, however, mysteriously and schizophrenically fluctuated. Number Seven, for example, could be stocky and scarred one day, stocky and smooth the next, tall and smooth the next. Secretly listed under every single number there were now ten soldiers, which added up to a hundred, ninety of them unofficially in Kesarh’s private army. The practice was not uncommon, but Kesarh was more subtle, and more accumulative, than most. He also had a distinct and conceivably unfair advantage. Charisma was either natural to or absent in a leader. The Prince Am Xai had a goodly share, a peculiar dark and pitiless human magic that kept his men enthralled even though they frequently had some grievance against him, for his brand of justice was often bizarre, and occasionally actually unjust.
And this one, now, was going to get Kesarh’s malevolent unjust justice all nicely cut into his back.
“And who do we send you to to be looked after,” the sergeant said conversationally, “when we take you down?”
The sick and the punished did not lie up here. The whole force, save those ten on duty, were billeted about the city. Sometimes they deserted, but there were always more to be found. This one, this Rem, had been a thief, had he not?
“There isn’t anyone,” said the soldier flatly.
“What, no friendly doxy you keep in a burrow somewhere?”
“Not just now.”
“Kin?”
The soldier glanced at him.
“I don’t ask idly,” said the sergeant. “If there is someone, you’ll need them.”
The soldier who called himself Rem looked out at the whipping-post, the iron cuffs hanging ready from it.
“Yes.”
“Well, then?”
“A woman,” Rem said. “The red house on Slope Street, near the harbor.” He smiled in an unsmiling way. “She may refuse. She’s the mistress of a dealer in rope and cord. He’s out of the city at the moment.”
“As well for you. All right, soldier. Strip to your drawers, you know the formula. It’ll come fast and hard, you’ll feel it less that way. And no worse after. Call me any names you like while I’m doing it. I was a whip-master in Zakoris twenty years ago, and good enough then.”
They walked out together to the post and Rem put up his hands into the cuffs, letting them snap closed. The two guards, the picked witnesses, grunted their commiserations. The sergeant gave him a drink of raw spirit that tasted itself like the edge of a lash.
Then the whip named Biter came down on his back.
• • •
Rem, as they suspected, was not his name. But the name she had pinned on him, his crazy mother, he would hardly use that. Even the abbreviated form it had come to have was too suggestive to a keen ear. Growing up in the middle environs of the city, and now and then its slums, through the white dusts of the hot months, the gray snows of the cold, every tenth or eleventh male child around him named for Raldnor of Sar, the Lowland hero, Rem’s name had brought nothing but trouble. His childhood had been spent fighting, and when he went home, he was battered and beaten there, too. His mother’s protectors did not care for him. His mother did not like him either.
Latterly, he had come to think some of those blows rained on his immature head responsible for what had now happened five times in the past five years. What had been happening, in fact, when Kesarh Am Xai had walked out of his apartments and found him.
Coming back to himself with the prince’s dagger eating at his throat, it had been wiser to pretend. The prince had obviously assumed Rem was dozing on duty, the slumber of a fool. To be a palace soldier to one of Kesarh’s unspoken ambition and arrogant strengths might lead somewhere. Rem sensed about Kesarh some special vitality, some gift for earthly power. The work beside brought regular money, and privileges. Rem did not want to sink back into his former trade of robbery with violence. The job of a soldier was similar enough, but it was lawful. The best fee for what you did the best—that was a logical goal.
If Kesarh knew what had happened to Rem by his door, there would have been no choice. It would have been dismissal. The streets again, the old ways, going nowhere.
Rem had glimpsed the girl come out of the room, shivering, one round shoulder uncovered through a tangle o
f dark hair. Then the pain shot through Rem’s skull like a lance. He knew what was coming, but there was nothing he could do. The girl did not notice. The palace corridor misted and went out and the picture flashed in behind his eyes like a flame. What he saw was absolutely clear, as these visions were always clear. A woman stood there, in his mind. He could not make out her garments but he caught the glimmer of violet jewels. Her hair was red, that blood-red color once rare, now less so, from the mixing of the blond and dark races. But not only did he see all this, he saw into her body, into her womb. A creature coiled there, in its silver bubble, sexless and sleeping. There was a shimmering about it, the pulse of an aura. He felt its inherent life, smelled it, like air before a storm. Such feelings, when he was his normal coherent self, he would have ridiculed. The mind-pictures that had come to him since late adolescence he would also mock and reject as soon as they were done. He would accuse himself neither of empathy nor prescience. The things he saw were like symbols and, so far as he had ever known, had had no relevance to his own existence. Otherwise, it was a kind of madness he had confessed to no one, and until today he had never been caught out.
That Kesarh himself should be the one to catch him was the worst of all bad luck.
But the lie had held. And Rem was used to beatings.
When they took him down he was conscious, and had not expected to be otherwise.
It somewhat surprised him, therefore, after he had been got into the wagon—en route to the harbor and paid to make a detour through Slope Street—to fall into a whirling nothingness. He came out of it to find his companion, the man detailed to play nurse until they reached the house, and a leather wine bottle. Rem drank, and nearly brought the vinegar back. There seemed no pain in his body until he moved even slightly. Then it shifted in shreds off his bones.
“We’re here, Rem. The house you said.”
Rem agreed with a ghastly chuckle, and somehow he and the other soldier got him out.
The gates in the russet brickwork were shut, but hammering brought a porter. It was the same sullen old man Rem recalled from a year ago, the last time he had been here. The house itself looked much the same, a narrow dwelling with no windows facing the street. The vines were a little thicker on the walls.
The porter was difficult. Master was away. Mistress would have to be told. They persuaded him to go tell her. Rem began to laugh. The other soldier was bored and ill-tempered and the wagon gone.
“You can leave me here,” Rem said, leaning on the gate.
“Yes. She’s sure to take you in. Only a bitch’d turn away a man in your state.”
“Then she may turn me away. For she’s the bloodiest of all bitches.”
The soldier shrugged. He went off to find a wineshop, his duty accomplished.
Rem hung on the gate. The heat of midday began to drum down on him and he was starting to faint again when the porter came back and let him in.
He walked across the court and into the house and into the room the old man had specified. The edges of his sight were vague, and so the shabby gaudy chamber made no impression. In the center of his eyes, however, the woman seemed brightly in focus, absurdly just like the bright clarity of the visions. The long youth of the Vis was starting to desert her, but it was her disappointment, her bitterness that had drawn her face into such hard dry lines. She had always been telling him of that bitterness and that disappointment, seldom any details, but a generalized medley of wrongs. How royalty had once loved her in Dorthar. How she had been ill-treated and used by the processes of intrigue, the foul treacheries of the court at Koramvis in the last days of its power. And how his father had deserted her. She had always hated Rem for his father’s sake. She had informed Rem that, even in the cradle, she had known her son would fail to love her.
He felt rather sorry for her. Her dark hair was elaborately dressed by the maid she beat with a rod when the girl displeased her, some old style, of that lost Koramvin court no doubt. The pins were gold-plated, and from her ears swung heavy black pearls, the untrue kind caused by injecting ink with the cultured grit.
She looked at him, the lines deep-cut between her brows, her wizened mouth turned down.
“For more than a year I see nothing of you. Then you come here like this and in disgrace. Am I supposed to care for you? How should I? What will he say when he comes home?”
“Your friend the merchant will say nothing, if he’s sensible. He will, besides, get some money from the coffers of the prince I serve.”
“Yes, he might like that,” she said spitefully.
“Or he can take one of his bits of cord and hang himself.”
Through the shirt they had thrown on him he felt his own blood soaking, scalding. The chamber trembled, and before he could stop himself he fell to his knees and vomited on the floor at her feet.
She jumped away in revulsion, calling him a string of gutter names. At the end of them she employed his given name, with all the searing scorn she could summon.
He spat, and said, “Even kings are capable of vomiting, mother.”
“Rarmon!” she screamed. “Rarnammon—” in a perfect seizure of malice.
He stood up and the pain filled him with despair. Business had fallen off, for the rope merchant, his mother’s recent protector, and two of the three servants had been sent packing. The damp storeroom they had occupied would be empty and Rem could lie up there. Of Kesarh’s bounty, they would feed him and perhaps make sure he stayed alive.
He waited therefore until her railing ran out, knowing it was useless to ask her for compassion. Only as a child had he once or twice uselessly done that, as Lyki slapped his head over and over back against some wall or other, or the day when she had caught him stealing from her and plunged his hands in boiling water.
She had been very pretty once, but how ugly she was now. He was close to vomiting again, but somehow controlled himself, knowing she would take it as one further insult, and all this would then go on much longer.
• • •
By mid-afternoon, the traveling-chariot was well advanced on the white road that led from Istris to Ioli, a journey of two days. Thereafter half a day’s riding should see them at the brink of the narrow straits where floated the isle of Ankabek. The nights between the days would be spent at discreet inns warned beforehand. The road was excellent, and in the hot season there was not likely to be anything to delay the party, which was a small one, although their speed was not great. The fine bred racing chariot-animals usual on the Vis mainland were less common in Karmiss, while the horses of Shansar-over-the-ocean did badly during long voyages and were less common still. Therefore thoroughbred zeebas drew the vehicle, capable of galloping, but only in bursts.
The Princess sat reading among her cushions, or else she merely gazed over the chariot rail, into the sun-washed haze. The girl who accompanied her had begun a flirtation with one of the two outriders. With good fortune, the little entourage would get back to the capital before Zastis bloomed in the sky.
The gilded day flushed into fire and a lion-like dusk. They had reached the hilly country that tomorrow would pour down to Ioli, and so to the northern strip of sea. The towered inn appeared with the first stars showing over its roofs.
Val Nardia veiled herself before they entered the courtyard. Her mantle, the escort and maid, were sufficient to command respect, and to avoid excitement. A minor princess, she journeyed simply as a lady. The inn received her as such.
In the private room high in the second tower, she ate some of the meal they had brought her. The wine was yellow—a Lowland vintage. The vines of Karmiss, burned twenty years ago when the ships fell on her coasts, had not yet come back to their fullness. Beer had come to be the drink of this land, and a fierce white spirit crushed from berries.
Beyond the opened shutters, the night possessed the sky.
Val Nardia sent the girl away and was alone.
As she sat in the chair, her book spread before her, her mind vacant and afraid, she heard a wild sweet melody rise from the inn below. A song was being sung, and irresistibly she must listen, trying to follow the words. Only one or two were audible through the floors, out of the open windows beneath. But suddenly she heard a name: Astaris. It was a song of Raldnor, then, the vanished hero of mixed blood, and of the Karmian princess, his lover, red-haired Astaris, said to have been the most beautiful of all women in the world.
Involuntarily, Val Nardia found she had touched her own rich hair.
When the song ended, she went to bed, and lay on the pillows, her eyes wide.
Long after the inn was quiet, Val Nardia watched the night in her window, whispering now and then the ritualistic prayers she had learned. The prayers to Anackire, the Lady of Snakes, who alone stood between Val Nardia and her dreams of terror and lust. But at last she did sleep, and saw her brother standing on a high hill against the flat flawed mirror of the sea, and knew she had called to him and that he would come toward her and she would be lost. And so, in the dream, it was.
• • •
They had been hunting, a successful hunt. Coming back at nightfall through the streets in a rumbling of wheels and clack of hooves, the King was easy enough to single out, golden on the amber horse, and laughing. There were cheers, and women, appearing on their balconies, cast down flowers. Suthamun Am Shansar had liked to keep here the informal boisterous roughness of his former court among the marshes and rocks of his homeland. They said that in his youth, for years after he had appropriated the crown of Karmiss, he would go in disguise about her cities, now a beggar, now a potter, now a dealer in livestock, just as gods had been used to do, playing with humanity. Those who were good to him in his pretended role he would afterwards reward—caskets of jewels for accommodating ladies, a stallion horse for some struggling groom who had given the poor beggar a coin. And those who treated him ill in his acting he would summon later to the palace, and there turn their bowels to water with the truth. They would have deserved it, for any who had not recognized their king by his hair or skin should have known him from his heavy accent and difficulty with the Vis tongue.