by Tanith Lee
When the word came of Yannul’s son, however, and the entertainment was planned, Yalef came back and demanded the girl for snake-sporting purposes.
Safca could hardly refuse.
At least the blonde hair had been dyed wood-color again. That had been at the girl’s own request. She had written it, so there could be no doubt. The art of writing was something she had to thank Safca for. Perhaps. The woman who taught the girl remarked that she was abnormally quick to learn her letters. Safca, observing the second of the two lessons, which were all that had been required, was filled by awe. It was as if the Lowlander had always known, merely needing to be reminded. . . .
Now the girl came to her and began to comb her hair.
At once, Safca was soothed, her taut muscles relaxing. She half-closed her eyes, watching the flowing movements of hands and hair in the mirror.
Relaxation did not prevail. Abruptly Safca noticed the amber ring had vanished from the Lowlander’s thumb. The ring had been Safca’s gift, her own possession, yet she so unfitted to wear delicate jewelry. Now it had been lost or snatched—Safca opened her mouth to demand where it had gone—or given in turn to another. Safca closed her lips in a tight thin line.
Had she saved the child from Yalef only to have her make other arrangements for herself?
Jealous and put out of patience by her jealousy, she grew rigid under the soothing caress of the comb.
• • •
Next morning, the youthful but august visitor departed, leaving the guardian’s elder daughter sleekly lying late a-bed. Maybe a child would result, to be the boast of Olm.
Safca, who had always had a temper if nothing else, threw a piece of pottery across the room, listened to it smash, then shouted for her litter.
The other man, the friend to Yannul’s son, had been as uninterested in Safca as she would have predicted. Something in her seethed and bubbled. She forgot the night the snake had coiled all about her. She remembered instead her mother’s deathbed, the lack of attendants, the lack of words. The few words which were said. Safca clutched the bracelet on her wrist, and ordered the litter-bearers to a trot, and ran them like kalinxes.
When she returned, Yalef met her in a corner of the outer court. With him was a tall blond man. Filled with dread, Safca did not know him for a moment. Then she did. Her heart quaked.
“The Am Vardath gentleman said you had a girl he’d like to buy.”
“No,” she said.
“Alas,” said Yalef. “I already had her brought and given to him. His servant took her off. She’s gone. She was no use to you, Safca. No real use to anyone.”
The Vardian grinned.
“Your brother’s received what you paid, Vis lady. Twenty parings of patriotic Olmish silver.”
She had no say, no power. What was she? An illegal daughter. Maybe not even the guardian’s work. And if the Am Vardath knew that story from the deathbed—he would spit on her literally, instead of merely by inference.
She tried not to cry. She could not even think why she should be crying. Was it her jealous rage which had lost her something she had not properly acknowledged, could only acknowledge now that she would lose it? But what, after all, was the child? A magician who could call serpents—
“Why,” she whispered, shamed by the Vardian’s sneer, “do you want her?”
“I saw last time her Vis-tan was a fraud, cover for a slave auction. Her skin’s white and her eyes yellow. She’s got a lot of pure Lowland blood. Bleach her hair and she’ll pass as immaculate. There are rewards in the Plains for rescuing their children from wicked Vis slavers, evil Vis owners. The Lowlanders, after all, are the elite race. Like my people, the Chosen of the goddess.”
Yalef, between nervousness, and pleasure in Safca’s discomfort, only beamed.
Safca bowed her head.
I shall never see her again.
• • •
There was nothing much at Hliha, save the shipping in the bay which ran in and out, organized from Xarabiss or Lanelyr or Lan. The only built thing, on the upland above the scatter of huts and tents, was a slim dark stone tower, one of the multitude Elyr had raised to gaze upon the heavens. Astrology, magic, mysticism, non-involvement, that was Elyr. She had no Kings. She produced enamels, that was her trade. Her fealty, if she knew the word, was given to Lan. One ascertained her temples, rare as the astrology towers were not, were very old. And black. Lowland style.
The ship put out from Hliha before sunrise, and carved over the sea toward Xarabiss.
Rem was on deck, watching their flight from an ascending sun, when he found the amber ring.
There was a reason. He recalled throwing his clothes on the floor that night at Olm. In the morning he had looked for the ring, also on the floor, and failed to find it. Reason assured him the ring had been caught up in a fold of cloth, dropped into the thief’s habitual knife-pocket of a sleeve—whence now it rolled back into his palm. Thief’s pocket and still a thief, it seemed.
He looked at the ring. There was no sensitization anymore. Just a circle of amber.
He could no longer very well return it to Olm. He would give it to Raldnor to give some girl.
He thought of the amber ring he had given Doriyos.
The amber sun shone over the ship to the water.
• • •
That night he awoke with the ring in his hand burning like a live coal. Or thought he woke. But somehow the dream went on. The clamor and the redness, and through it he saw the peaceful deck, the tilted sail, the awning, the other sleepers. At the prow the watch leaned out, and through him and through the Zastis-colored night, blades seared down and up, and great doors rocked, booming.
“What is it?”
Lur Raldnor’s voice, wide awake, came through his skull.
He could not speak.
Suddenly his fingers were being prized open. He heard Raldnor curse, and then the ring was gone.
The night cleared. There was only sea and sky and ship.
“The amber,” said Lur Raldnor, “it’s red-hot.”
“Ankabek,” said Rem. He started to breathe again. He heard himself speak and understood only as if another told him. “Kesarh’s won his battle. The free Zakorians are routed.”
Raldnor said quietly: “How do you know?”
“I saw it. Mind pictures. This has happened, something like this—years—Never quite like this. From my father’s side, maybe.” Rem stared into the merciful, ordinary night. He said, “Zakoris. Routed, turning like a wounded tirr. Not against Lan, Dorthar, Ommos. Ankabek.”
• • •
Vodon Am Zakoris had lost the battle and therefore, though he lived, his life.
The thirty-eight ships that had turned for home, heavy with spoils from the southwest rim of Karmiss, last-laden from the rich little Ommos port of Karith they had left alight behind them, had met the navy of the Karmian King lying like a sailed city on the afternoon water.
The ships of Zakoris-In-Thaddra were pirates still, but they had always borne the sigil of Old Zakoris on their canvas. That a king sent out his fleet against them, sigiled in its turn with the Lily emblem of the Karmians, and with, at the prow of all their prows, a ship flying the scarlet Salamander of the King himself— that was challenge for challenge. Kesarh did them the honor of offering them war.
They came together then. The black biremes with terrified slaves at their oars and the leopard-bees of Yl standing ready on their decks. The Karmians’ lighter, Shansarian-modeled vessels, curved like swans, that Kesarh had favored, who favored almost nothing else out of Shansar, were rowed for pay and glory. Fifty-three Karmian ships; a score of whirling flame-throwers; half a score of the giant bows which fired their giant arrows of iron to a range of sixty lengths—capable of splitting timbers and breaking masts, at more intimate range capable of slicing a smaller craft in two; six towe
ring fire-catapults; eleven buffer-shot bombards of oil. And packed on their decks close to five thousand fighting men.
Until this time, such an armament and such a multitude had not been sent against Free Zakoris. Fierce as they were, the Zakorians might yet have stolen victory, or wreaked havoc, or at least won space to win through. But there was not only force, there was deployment and preparation against them. Almost as they closed, they were encircled. As their weapons screamed out incendiaries, defensive shots came from the foremost Karmian galleys, knocking two thirds of the blow away, some of it back on the Zakorians. This was a trick not often mastered, but Kesarh’s men had mastered it. The machines of Karmiss had been perfected and the gangs trained to the job had learned to use these great weights, poised on hair’s breadth slipwires of steel, with the accuracy of deflecting spears. The Free Zakorians’ first rain of arson was dispersed, then, and the second rain came from the Karmian side.
As the fire-clouds rose, and the air-borne blades of Karmiss fell again and again, Vodon drove his own galley to engage the royal ship which, flaunting its Salamander, had drifted to the north.
To kill their King would stand for much, when so much else might be destroyed.
Vodon’s ship was not in time to reach the Salamander. A pair of Zakorian biremes fell upon her. He saw them grapple her, and knew all at once she was too easy to come up with. By then, so it had been found. The figures at her rail were straw dressed as men.
It was a joke in the middle of carnage. There was another joke, a memory of twenty-eight years before. The invaders were still grappled, disengaging, when the Salamander exploded. She had been filled with oil and primed, slow-burning. In a similar way the sea had been fired at Karith in the Lowland War, to repulse the fleets of Vathcri, Vardath, Shansar.
Wreckage and hailing flame showered about Vodon’s galley as they pulled away. The other two, panic and fire, were going down with the Salamander.
Vodon concluded Kesarh had not, after all, come in person to fight. This disheartened him, even as he despaired.
By sunset, it was not only the sun that fell burning.
In the dusk, five free Zakorian ships, scorched and ragged, limped from the maze of steam and smoke. They ran. There was no other word. Vodon’s vessel, which had by lot the battle-command, was the third of these. It was instinct by then. For having failed, having shown weakness, there was no place for which to run.
Trailing through the night at the pace of death, they were not pursued, but some of them were in poor shape and the sea drank two of them under. The other three took up men left floundering in the ocean, as reflexively as they had fled. While different men, those who had died of their injuries during the flight, they cast down there, to the courts of Rorn.
But the Rorn gods in the prows, to whom they had offered lavishly after Karith, went hungry now.
When the dawn came, they huddled at anchor, resting the slaves, not from pity, from necessity. Several were dead, and the corpses were unshackled and flung over after the rest. Thaddrian corpses, Alisaarian, Otts, Iscaians, and Corhls, came between the sun’s path and the water. There was even one blond corpse, a mix from the Old Kingdom, now Vardian Zakoris.
Vodon stood with his two officers of deck and oars, and their two seconds.
Their faces were sullen with knowledge. To return to Zakoris-In-Thaddra would mean death-sentence, and ghastly death, the reward of failure. Their other option was the traditional suicide pact, the recognized exit when contrary odds had proved insurmountable. Vodon, the ship lord, must kill these four men on whom the onus of the lost battle had rested. Then himself, the figurehead. Thus they would assure their families at least survived unmolested, retaining the very little they had. Their names would not be spat on.
They had not got far in the night. The current rocked them, racing in to swell the straits between Dorthar and Karmiss.
The dark men stood looking at the waves. Their hair was black, which, if they had sailed the western or southern oceans, it would not have been. The salt of those seas had a bleaching property, perhaps due to their proximity to the great Sea of Aarl, where volcanoes blew fire spouts as fish blew water.
Vodon brought his mind back to terminus. He made a gesture that they should go below.
Vodon’s deck master caught his arm.
“Wait.”
“For public flogging across chest and loins, slow dismemberment, disemboweling? No.”
“You mistake me. I’m suggesting one more deed before this.”
“What?”
The deck master pointed, away into the straits.
“We must go to Zarduk, or to Rorn. Let’s take him a present. Destroy one of the lives of the yellow men’s woman god.”
The sullen sodden faces sparked alert.
“The Anack temple.”
“Will their King Kesr not have protected it?”
“I never heard he did, Kesr has brought the men gods of Karmiss back. He gives Anack only offal at the feast.”
They laughed.
The watch-horn sounded to the other two ships.
With the tide, they turned into the straits for Ankabek.
• • •
The three ships were seen at sunfall, sliding dark out of a coming night. There had for some while been awareness on the island of the goddess that eventually religious immunity might fail. A pattern of actions had been prepared. These were instigated.
The village at the landing was swiftly deserted. Other pockets of outlying humanity on the island were alerted by the flare of beacons along the rocky slope, ignited as the first fugitives passed on their way to the temple.
The Free Zakorians, as they hove nearer, saw these fireworks across the gathering dark, but flame, so often the emblem of catastrophe, only stimulated them.
The landing at Ankabek had not sufficient depth of water to accommodate their biremes. They anchored a mile from the coast therefore, and put out for the beach in relays of boats.
Long before they were fully landed, the live things of the island were all within the central temple precincts, men, women, children, and the animals of their sustenance.
The Free Zakorians scoured the village as a matter of course, and fired it, before pressing on up the slope.
• • •
The priestess Eraz, having dressed herself in her golden robes, walked the buried corridors toward the Sanctum. Years had passed since the aura of such robes had been thought needful. More than eight years. Yet they were as beautiful and as shining. Eraz herself looked no older than in that hour she had confronted in her gold the young soldier of the Prince Kesarh. Rem, who had been called Rarnammon, on whom the Dream of the goddess lay like a faintly perceptible light. At that hour he was the Messenger. The Message had required to be given surely. Not merely words and scenes, but in the coinage of Power. Eraz had possessed the Power to impart, and he the Power to receive.
The future of his body’s life continued now, along the lines of invisible brilliance, the roads of the planet’s own force. Her body’s life would end tonight. She was saddened, for she had learned to love her body, in the rightful way, and to love the form her soul had taken in this body. To imagine leaving her flesh and meeting again with her soul as it truly was, this was daunting, the reunion with a beloved stranger. But, that was only the fear of the unremembered thing. After death, memory returned. She would not fear, nor be a stranger to herself, then.
She ascended, and passed through the final unsealed door into the Sanctum. She was the last to enter. The door was immediately closed and barred behind her.
The gold curtain had not yet been lifted from before the goddess.
The rest of the room was not unduly crowded, though all were present. The men and women of the island, and of the temple. The novices, the acolytes, the priests and priestesses. And the beasts. Cows lowed, their feet covering the
bodies of heroes in the mosaic floor. A pet rodent scampered, chased by a child, in and out, a game.
The waste also saddened her. But the souls of beasts and men could not die. There would be other lives for them in the world, or other worlds. Nothing was for nothing.
They looked at her, and she felt the strength of her aura touch, clasp, enfold them. They could not all know these things. Or could not all trust in them. She must hold them now, their mother, as Anackire held the earth, or the Principle, which they had named Anackire, held it. Eraz smiled a little. It was not hubris.
And outside, the Black Leopard raced toward them.
She had felt their aura, too, the Free Zakorians, a thundercloud. Death and agony of spirit, and lust for the agony of others.
Had she, Eraz, contained the Power of one such as Raldnor Rehdon’s son, had this room been filled by Lowlanders imbued by that Power, then, no doubt, they would not have been the victims. Yet the place where the hero had worked his magic—the earthquake, Koramvis’ fall—had been adjacent to the great Power-source of the hidden cave temple, known to the ancients of Eraz’s people, who had set there the colossal goddess statue. That charge, the vitality of Raldnor, combined—Ankabek was not a power-source, though the island lay over one of those lines of psychic power that ribbed the planet: The line that ran to Koramvis from the arcane kingdom of the Zor.
But no, she must not idle, musing on these occult mathematics. They had not the strength to stand against their enemies, either of body or psyche. That strength had been, and was to come.
As she raised her head, there was a terrible booming.
Women in the small crowd cried out. There was not one of them who did not know what the sound indicated. The Free Zakorians had reached the temple’s outer doors and had begun the process of breaking them in. Having some knowledge of Ankabek, they would have brought make-shift rams from their ships to do it.
Even so, the noise seemed far away.
Eraz began to speak.
“We are well defended,” she said. “The outer doors, when secured, are very hard to penetrate, though they will penetrate them. The Sanctum is enclosed, and it is unlikely any Zakorian may breach the stone’s mechanism, even by random accident.” She saw their faces, and understood she must not prolong their hope, which was groundless. “Yet,” she said, “they will also gain access to the precinct of the novitiates. Corridors descend there and run below the temple, connecting to stairs which lead between this chamber’s outer and inner walls. Here there are doorways only of metal, barred only by metal. Through such a doorway you saw me just now enter.” She waited a moment, her heart chilled at their faces, now. She said, “Others than they might abandon the central temple. The inner ways which lead to it are complex. They would not try them, might not even search for them. But these Free Zakorians are different. There is shame and death before them. They have, in turn, a madness to debase and to kill. By the desperation of this need, they will discover the way in to us. Hours may pass, but you will eventually hear them against these inner doors, which cannot forever keep them out.” Women wept. Children, catching fear, wept also. The beasts were troubled. There was anguish and horror. She must conclude. “We know the leniency of Free Zakoris. To their own kind they are merciless. For us they will have torture unspeakable. I shall describe none of it. Remember only what you know of them. They will leave none alive, but for many death will be slow. They will kill also your children in hideous ways, and your beasts. They will drink blood in the stolen wine. Then they will burn whatever is left.” She paused. She said, “The statue of Anackire they will hoist and drag and fling into the sea, though they will tear away her jewels and cut out her eyes, and rip away the curtain for loot. Such spoil will be vaunted in Zakoris-In-Thaddra. They will say they have slain one of Her lives.”