by Tanith Lee
A moment later the woman herself halted. She beckoned to a seller of fruit. At once he and his assistant ran forward, and laid panniers of citruses and grapes before her. She selected, by pointing at it, one fruit. It was taken up and given her. Offering neither thanks nor payment, the woman moved on.
As they rode toward the twisted metal pillars that marked the gateway of the palace, Lur Raldnor said to Rem, “I begin to understand why my father left Dorthar.”
• • •
Thann Xa’ath was King in Xarabiss now, the oldest of Thann Rashek’s eleven sons.
They were assured an audience, then left kicking their heels for two hours in a nicely appointed room with a fountain. Plainly, this was not Olm. At last a servant came to conduct them to a larger room with a larger fountain. The King was sitting at ease, flanked by a couple of guards, a couple of minstrel girls, a scatter of courtiers. There were two Lowlanders. They were not as ice-pale as the woman in the Market, but they sat apart under an ornamental indoor tree, watching, seemingly unresponsive.
The King welcomed the son of Yannul the Lan and his traveling companion.
The portion of court clapped.
Rising, the King took Lur Raldnor over to the Lowland men. After sufficient pause to demonstrate amply they had no need, they got to their feet and greeted Lur Raldnor. One spoke. “We remember keenly all our allies, those who fought beside us. Your father’s name is unforgotten.” Thann Xa’ath bore this without a murmur. The implication was not veiled. Xarabiss, who called herself the ally of the Plains, had in fact stayed neutral.
“You’ve arrived at an opportune season,” Thann Xa’ath said to Yannul’s son. “The son of Raldnor Am Anackire’s second most famous captain—our own Xaros—is at court.”
Nor was this veiled. The King saw fit to remind the Lowlanders not all Xarabiss had skulked at home.
Thann Xa’ath began to walk about the room, his hand on Lur Raldnor’s shoulder. One guard moved smoothly, almost negligently, behind them.
A woman said to Rem, “Do you go to Dorthar, too?”
He told her that he did. She smiled, and said, “I also. In the Princess’ train. A tiresome long journey. Didn’t you know? Where have you been? In Lan? Oh, naturally, there’s never any news in Lan. The King’s daughter is just now to be sent to the Storm Lord. Etiquette generally dictates even a High King should come to claim his bride from her father’s house. But Raldanash must remain in Anackyra, with all this talk of war—” Her patronizing smile grew more intent; she widened her charcoaled eyes at him. “They’ll have missed Zastis for their consummation. But I think that may not matter. Raldanash is cold, they say. The hero Raldnor’s son! Do you think it possible?”
“As you mentioned,” Rem said, “we get no news of any sort in Lan.”
He excused himself and went to remind a wine-server of his existence.
But it turned out to be the truth they were now expected to join the cumbersome bridal caravan that would be wending to Dorthar in five days’ time.
Xa’ath’s daughter had been betrothed to the Storm Lord of six years. It was form. Raldanash, entering Dorthar at the age of thirteen, accepting his first three queens a year later, already had a bevy of wives from almost every country of Vis, and out of Shansar and Vardath also. Xarabiss, lacking daughters old enough for bedding, young enough for wedding, had lagged behind till now.
But it seemed Ulis Anet Am Xarabiss was worth awaiting. She had Karmian blood on her mother’s side, that fabled part-Xarabian part-Karmian mixture which had produced the legendary Astaris.
“Well, she’s red-haired at least,” said Lur Raldnor, leaning on a parapet two evenings later. “And with very light skin. That much I got from her lady. You know, the young one I—”
“I know.”
“I heard something more.”
“You’re getting to gossip just like a Xarabian,” said Rem, tickled.
“What else is there to do here, apart from the other thing? This Iros son of Xaros we’ve not yet met. He’s been given the command of Ulis’ personal guard. To attend her to and in Dorthar. Which may be unwise.”
“Because.”
“Because Iros is her lover.”
“I thought custom decreed the bride of a king went to him with her seals intact.”
“He needn’t have deflowered her to have shared her bed.”
“If he’s so restrained,” said Rem, “he’ll be able to control his jealous rage in Dorthar, presumably.”
“Or Iros may have had her. She’s only a subsidiary wife, not chosen to be High Queen. So long as she’s not with child, she’s acceptable.”
Iros was on view that evening. He sat at the King’s side through dinner, and afterwards was noted dicing familiarly with two of Thann Xa’ath’s sons.
Dressed in the casual wear of a high-ranking officer, Iros was exceptionally handsome, as his father had been in his youth and still was, reportedly. The son’s personality, however, was his own. Xaros’ reputation was that of a mercurial opportunist, who had won a decisive stroke of the Lowland War with one fortuitous trick. Iros, though he laughed and jested and gave evidence of wit, had the peacock’s other side of arrogance and anger. Introduced to Lur Raldnor, Iros’ junior by several years, the Xarabian flashed a smile and said, “And are we supposed to hang on each other’s necks all night for our fathers’ sakes? Or can I simply go back to the dice with a clear conscience?”
“Please,” said Lur Raldnor quietly, “return to the dice. I wouldn’t dream of detaining you.”
Iros flushed under his Xarabian skin. His mouth curled and he said, “I’m glad you understand a soldier’s pleasures. But you’re not a soldier, are you? You anticipate something in Dorthar?”
Lur Raldnor looked at him out of advantageous Lowland eyes, then said, “Courtesy?”
Iros scowled. “You’re saying—”
“I’m saying your dice game is pining for you.”
Iros sneered, but could do nothing else but go. He went, and lost the next three throws, as they heard all across the chamber and even over the dancing girls’ music.
So, they had seen Iros. Rem did not see Ulis Anet until the night before the bridal caravan set out.
• • •
“What’s the matter?” said Yannul’s son, coming out on the balcony.
“I thought you were with your Princess’ lady,” said Rem.
“I was, earlier. It’s nearly morning now, not worth taking to bed here. We’ll be leaving in a few hours.”
Rem spoke of the perfidy of timing involved in royal progresses.
“You still didn’t say what the matter was. Is it—”
“No,” said Rem. “Zastis is finished, and besides, half the palace carries on like an Ommos Quarter. Go to bed.”
Lur Raldnor nodded, waited, vanished.
The air was fresh and cool in the last spaces of the night. The unlit darkness made an all too perfect slate on which to draw again the pictures, and the thoughts.
To try to recall the first time it ever happened. The lancing pain through the skull, and then the image within the skull, shutting out all else.
Late adolescence. He recollected exactly the hour and the place—Istris, behind the wine-sellers on Jar Street—he had been drunk. He had put the vision away as a thing of the drunkenness, could not now remember what it had been. Nor the others, the two, three, that had fastened on him. . . . Had they borne any relation to his life or to anything? They must have done. For in the end, prescient, empathic, whatever they were, they had all had meaning. Even the mirage which shut his eyes outside Kesarh’s door and earned him a lashing.
He could evoke that one easily. The red-haired woman standing like a stone. And in her womb, the beginning of another life.
And then Kesarh going by on his way to bid stormy farewell to his sister—the sister he
loved carnally, Val Nardia, that he would make his mistress at Ankabek. Mistress, and mother of his child.
And at Ankabek itself, in the blind circling corridor of the temple which was now a burned-out husk, the second mirage. Three women, white hair, blood hair, ebony. And the three embryos like wisps of silver steam—
There had been other details. Perhaps, as with the more recent seeings, they had to do with his connection to Raldnor Am Anackire. His—father.
But the vision at Ankabek had told him already who he was. He had been shown the three women who had carried Raldnor’s seed. White-haired Sulvian of Vathcri, mother of Raldanash the Storm Lord. Ebony-haired Lyki—Rem’s own mother—had she not surely identified herself with a blow! And thirdly, the red-haired woman of his former sighting: Astaris.
How many knew that she had lodged in her womb the third child of Raldnor? In all the mythos, there had never been a word of it.
Even Yannul had not known.
The child had been lost, so much was sure. Raldnor and Astaris were gone. Their progeny, if it had survived, had had long years to reveal itself. And had not. And yet somehow the worshippers of Anackire at Ankabek had guessed at its being, its loss of being, looking for the balance to be set right. They had searched for some resembling conjunction of flesh and race. Maybe grotesquely, predictably, they had perceived it in Val Nardia and Kesarh. Blood of the blood peoples mixed with Vis, the sorcerous affiliation of twins, and one other thing, omen of omens—
No wonder Ankabek had held Val Nardia’s corpse in stasis, brought the child to term—
Do I give credence to any of this? Do I even acknowledge the engineering of a holy mystery? No. It’s lust gone sour, insomnia. How could they breed her for that, and their magic let her end a wolf child?
Since the night he had seen the attack on Ankabek through the body of the Xarabian ship. Rem had kept the amber ring among his slight baggage, carefully not easy of access. To take out the ring now, hold it, wear it, might clarify these things. He did not want them clarified.
After all, he had been given a sign, if he must rest this craziness on proofs.
She had come to the banquet, her last night in her father’s palace. Beforehand, the whole place had been murmuring about how beautiful she was, this late daughter of the royal line. How nearly like Astaris, the most beautiful woman in the world.
Rem had not looked to be impressed in any way. As a rule he did not like women. If they were beautiful, he saw it with a grim detachment, or missed it altogether.
Ulis Anet entered the hall with her maidens.
She was lustrously red-haired, as foretold, and her gown was the exact red of her hair with a girdle of red-gold. At her throat shimmered a necklace of polished amethysts, a Xarabian jewelry pun, for the amethyst was the jewel closest in looks to a Serpent’s Eye.
She was slim and graceful. Then he realized her figure and her walk reminded him of another’s.
And then, she was near enough he saw her face.
Ulis Anet, said to resemble Astaris, was also a replica of Val Nardia, the mistress-sister of Kesarh.
• • •
Yeiza, her skin fragrant from the grasses she had lain among with Lur Raldnor, knew better than to make a sound beside the doors to the Princess’ bedchamber. She did, however, pause a moment to listen.
Two voices, but not vocal in love.
Shaking her head, as one party to affairs of great importance, Yeiza, unable to make out a syllable, crept away.
Beyond the doors, Iros stood, fully clothed in his elegant attire. A single lamp was burning and Ulis Anet was seated beneath it, robed for the bed she had not sought.
“Then I’ll leave you, madam,” he said coldly. “And this is the end of it.”
“You should never have come here.”
“The secret passage remained unlocked and unguarded. If you’d wanted to keep me out you should have left men there. They might have killed me. Then you’d have been rid of me for good.”
The girl sighed. The sigh caught a flare of purple at her throat where the amethysts still lay.
“You know I don’t wish you anything but well, Iros. But you should have had more sense than to visit me tonight.”
“I should have waited till we were on the road? Come swaggering into your tent for all to see? Or waited for Dorthar, till your white-haired High King tires of you? From what I’ve heard that will be swiftly. If he even troubles to bed you at all.”
Ulis Anet rested her forehead on her hand. She was exhausted. They had had this discussion over and over during the past months.
“Even if,” she said, “I am to live as a virgin in Dorthar, there can be nothing further between us.”
“I’m so dear to you.”
Her temper snapped suddenly, and she rose.
“Don’t be a fool. Do you think I want this match? I’ve no choice, and neither have you. You’ve given me no peace—”
“What peace have I had—”
“What else can I do? Run away with you like a peasant girl married off against her will to some farmer? I’ve been given to the Storm Lord. You knew of it and all that it meant before ever you saw me.”
His eyes blazed with hatred.
“I love you!” he shouted.
Had Yeiza been at the door, this much she would have heard.
“Love. Well, you’ve a choice in lovers. I have none.”
“You chose me, once,” he said, more softly.
“Yes.” She closed her eyes.
“And if Whitehair takes you, he’ll find as much.”
“It seems it doesn’t matter,” she said, “providing there has been adequate interval.”
“He values you so highly.”
Ulis Anet turned. She walked to a mirror and stared it at her beautiful face, the mellifluous lines of her body. And behind her the handsome and furious demon who had invaded her unsympathetic world. She did not love him, but she had been amorously and tenderly fond of him. She doubted now if she had ever meant as much to him. If the bond with Dorthar had not claimed her, she might have been made Iros’ wife, to mark his father’s standing. He would have valued her royalty and her looks, and been frequently and blatantly adulterous elsewhere.
Getting no reply from her, he strode to the drapery that hid the secret door. He wrenched the curtain off its rings and flung out into the stone passageway.
Straight-backed, she crossed to the door and closed it. Then she sat at her window, watching the sun begin to come, since it was too late now for sleep.
12.
THE PRINCESS’ CARAVAN wandered through the heart of summer, slow, dreamlike. They seemed to make no speed at all. Plains gave way to hills and hills to plains, beneath skies powdered by dust or stars. One impressive city enveloped them, then let them go. At night, another would appear far off before them in a valley, haloed with lights.
For Rem it was a time of timelessness. Lur Raldnor was not often nearby. After dark he was with his Yeiza, the Princess’ youthful chief lady. By day, the boy was taken up by the royal circle. Ulis Anet had noticed and liked him. Perhaps that was a further move to anger her commander Iros, or further to keep Iros at bay. Xaros’ son rode at the head of his column of men, stony-faced. His behavior toward his royal charge was ostentatiously correct, so impeccable as to be suspect. There was now hardly anyone in the entourage, down to the last groom or page, who had not fathomed what had been the relation of the commander of the King’s daughter’s guard to the King’s daughter. One day a soldier was flogged a hundred yards from the camp, and left out half dead all through the heat of noon. Apparently he had been overheard by Iros whistling some song invented upon some matter.
At night the commander entertained lavishly and grossly in his pavilion, or organized torchlit chariot-races, making the darkness raucous. In the cities, he picked out the lushest availab
le women and paraded his lust all through dinner.
• • •
Sometimes, on the upper plains, thunder came cantering across the skyline, a storm of wild zeebas, shearing away at the last instant from the campfires.
Rem, walking beyond the tents along the rim of a hill in the dusk, glimpsed a man and a woman entwined oblivious amid the fern. Raldnor and his girl. Noiselessly, unseen, Rem avoided them.
Zastis was done, and maybe it was only that which made this distancing in him. The urgent frustration of Lan had become like another’s memory, not his own. Yannul’s son seemed far off, a pleasing sight, amiable companion, a hundred years younger than Rem and scarcely recognized.
• • •
Ommos, the ill-famed.
They saw Uthkat on the plain of Orsh, where Raldnor Am Anackire had routed the Vis, and later the ruins of Goparr which Raldnor Am Anackire had razed for treachery. History still moved. Less than a month before, Karith had been burnt by the Free Zakorian fleet, and troops were toiling across the landscape, skirting the caravan once its mission was ascertained. The indigenous Ommos were dark, inclined to flesh, their accent so thick as to create almost another language from familiar words. Other than soldiery, the whole kingdom seemed bare and deserted, and the towns looked dark by night.
At Hetta Para they were received. The capital had been cast down in the War. The new city was something else again, little more than a town on the outskirts of a wreck.
There was no king in Ommos now, but a man who named himself Guardian, a Lowlander. The court, if such it might be termed, was Lowland, too.
The betrothed of Raldanash was austerely and publicly entertained some three or four hours, with a group of her followers. Then they were all consigned to cramped apartments, or to anything the area might be thought to offer.
Those who investigated the spareness of the new Hetta Para and the shambles of the old, came back with stories of an Anackire temple of black stone, its portals patrolled by Lowland guards, of the immemorial fire-dancers in taverns of the ruin, boys or women, scorching their clothing from them with lighted torches, and of a Zarok fire god flung down in a pit. Lowland work, on whom the Ommos came ritualistically and fawningly to urinate, making all the while partly hidden religious gestures for mercy to the god.