Anackire

by Tanith Lee

  There were countless delays between Hetta Para and the border.

  It was not for another five days that they came to the river and saw the repaired garrison outpost the War had once destroyed, while the bowl-topped Dortharian watchtower belched out blue purple smolder to welcome them.

  • • •

  Dorthar.

  My father came here, not knowing then, as I know mine, his line or dubious rights or heritage. Insolent, ill-at-ease, in danger, in love with the land and hating the land for its symbols and its shadow.

  Rem looked about him: earth, mountains, sky.

  What’s Dorthar, then, to me?

  • • •

  For the entry into the city of Anackyra, Lur Raldnor had been granted a chariot, and a team of thoroughbred animals, and his best clothes had come out of the traveling chest.

  “What do you want to do?” he inquired of Rem.

  “What we agreed. You’ll be presented. When the moment is suitable, you give him Yannul’s letters. At some point he’ll read them.”

  “From what I’ve heard he may not.”

  Rem had also, here and there, picked up Xarabian evaluations of the Storm Lord.

  “Then politely stress them, indicating the Koramvin seal.”

  “But you’ll follow me into the presence chamber.”

  “If allowed.”

  “Where are you placed for the entry?”

  “Behind the chariots, somewhere.”

  Lur Raldnor appraised him and eventually said, “You do know this indifference isn’t humbleness on your part, don’t you? It’s pride. You’re already saying: I know who I am. Let him find out.”

  The conversation was held by the old white road which had led across the plain under Koramvis. It was dusk and the tents were up. Tomorrow they would be going in to the new metropolis, and down the valley above the ancient watchtower the smoke plume still hung, one tone darker than the darkening sky.

  “It’s possible,” said Rem, “that even when he does find out, he may not care to know.”

  “Whatever we’ve heard of him, he wouldn’t risk that. He needs you as a friend, not an enemy. Think of the harm you could do him if estranged.”

  “I’ve thought. And Raldanash may think. He might consider me worth a tactful murder.”

  Lur Raldnor grinned.

  “This isn’t Karmiss.”

  Rem was taken aback. Had he implied so much about Kesarh’s service?

  Across the long slope of the valley plain, where the ground rose up to the hills which, before the quake, had been of a different shape, the night-fires of the new city began to gleam.

  When the boy had gone off to share the Princess’ tent-court, Rem stayed, looking toward the city.

  There had been groves of fruit trees and cibba here, burned long ago or cut down. The last battle had begun on this earth. All day, he had noted the superstitious mutter as they approached.

  He wondered suddenly if men here alone at night fancied they heard the cries of war and pain, and felt the land start to shudder. He half expected one of the visions to seize on him. But nothing came, and only the lighted lamps of Anackyra shone two miles off, no sheen of ghosts.

  • • •

  The Princess Ulis Anet was dressed in white. Rem, after the first startlement had lessened, had observed her skin was darker than Val Nardia’s had been. Clad in the whiteness intended to symbolize her fitness for a High King of the fair races, she looked darker yet, but arrestingly so, like an icon of pale gold. Her ruby-colored hair was appropriately veiled in an openwork mesh of rubies.

  Before and behind her chariot came Iros’ men, blinding with polished metal. The banners of Xarabiss and the blazon of Thann Xa’ath swayed glittering from their poles.

  The caravan had sprouted into the usual elements of show.

  Dancing girls clothed only in brilliant body-paint with disconcerting mirrors at their groins, acrobats, and magicians producing globes of radiance from the air. Twelve milk-white kalinxes had been found—or bleached—to draw three gilded carts from which sweets, flowers and small pieces of money might be thrown to the crowds by girls dressed in the carmine robes of Yasmis, the Xarabian love-goddess. Before the rule of Anackire, a statue of Yasmis would have been carried in any betrothal and bridal procession that could afford one. No longer.

  Musicians played. The chariots rolled.

  Where the new road went between the fields and orchards, it was lined by peasants, holding their children up to see, and young girls casting petals and looks at the soldiery.

  A quarter of a mile from the gates, Raldanash’s envoy met them, with a further escort.

  For the first time Rem saw the white goddess banners of Anackyra, and carried amid them the device of his half-brother, the hero Raldnor’s legal son. Raldanash’s emblem was a brazen serpent coiled about a black thunder-cloud, gripping the might of it surely in immovable coils. The understanding was there for any with eyes to see.

  Koramvis had been reckoned the wonder of the north. Anackyra, going up fast on the back of her ruin, had had something to beat.

  Yannul had left before the city was completed. The post-War council, mixed of Vis and Lowlanders and men of the Sister Continent, had held together reasonably well under the original Koramvin Warden, Mathon. An old man then, initially chosen for his post just because he was old and therefore considered safe, the earthquake had spared him and he had gone on to watch the city reborn over the plain beneath and the forested western hill-slopes. He had outlived Yannul’s defection, and the death of another who had been, in his way, a friend to the hero Raldnor, the Dragon Lord Kren. Kren had died the year the boy King entered Anackyra. Mathon, though, had lived to one hundred and twelve, an age not unheard of among the Vis, but spectacular considering the upheavals of his era. He had seen the commencing years of Raldanash’s reign. He had seen the city finished. To the end, Mathon had kept his wits and, they said, his uselessness. Now the Warden of Anackyra was a Vathcrian, a cousin of the King’s from home.

  • • •

  The walls were high and thick. There was something in that. Until a few years ago, all but the royal area had been unwalled.

  White stone, touched with white crystal and white gold: White fire. Young—she was younger than Rem himself. Beautiful she was too, naturally. They had donated to her all the glories of aftermath. On raised terraces her ten goddess-temples blazed back the sun.

  But she did not feel young, or beautiful, or even old under the youngness and beauty, antique Vis crying out in anger at her chains. She tasted of—nothing.

  Yet, something there was.

  The heat had come early, and there was a curious styptic quality to the air. Rem consoled the neck of the zeeba he rode, gauging its tension, which maybe it had only caught from him.

  But there was a stillness, too, which was not possible, for ever since they had got in the gate, the crowds, packed by the road, on balconies and rooftops, had been screaming and calling, and the clatter and music of the entourage itself was enough to deafen a man. Yet those crowd noises, which were at first too loud to have patience with, now seemed engulfed, bat-squeaks in some colossal and echo-less cave.

  In Anackyra, as in Koramvis, there was an Avenue of Rarnammon, this one far longer. It was ten chariot-lengths wide, lined by massive statuary—dragons, serpents, and mere human giants. Where the avenue opened out before the terraced approach to the palace, the square was dominated by Rarnammon himself, gigantic above the giants, in a chariot on a plinth. The monument was all gold and gold-washed bronze, with windows for the eyes of saffron glass behind which twin torches were kept lit. In the shadow of this, the Storm Lord would give public welcome to his Xarabian bride.

  The stillness was heavy as a blanket, now.

  Ahead, the chariots, Iros’ smart men, the ruby-haired woman in her car decked by
flowers.

  “Storm coming,” someone said just behind Rem. “Look how the trees’re thrashing about.”

  Involuntarily Rem turned to see. The trees above the walls were motionless. There was no one close enough at his shoulder to have spoken so hoarsely and been heard.

  “Magic,” someone else said, directly before him. He almost felt the breath strike his face and there was no one so near. “Oh gods—what is it?”

  Rem looked up and saw the hills above the city. There were white towers there, but only for a moment. He saw the red spout and gush of powdered rock explode silently from beneath Koramvis’ walls. Then the hills ran together and the towers were lifted like an offering to an ink-black sky.

  Even as it happened, he was aware it was not real; he felt the zeeba beneath him and kept it in hand. His eyes were open and he knew where he was. Then he seemed to blink, and the hills were calm, the summer morning light spread through them.

  He thought, without hurry., precisely, Prophecy, this time. There’s about to be an earthquake.

  The zeeba tossed its head and mouthed the reins. You could see it now, all along the route the animals were growing fractious. Men, irritably forcing them to keep the line, were responding too, unknowingly.

  In the grip of it, Rem felt only an enormous distancing, no terror. He understood he would be aware to the second. He rode on, holding the zeeba steady.

  The Avenue widened and gave on to the great square. Ahead, the mighty Rarnammon statue, behind that the Imperial Hill, the terraced rise with the palace, and higher, framed in forest, the oldest temple of the Dortharian Anackire. Across the nearer space, the glint of other caparisons, banners, the figurines of the Storm Lord and his officials. And the crowd everywhere, and more running in to pile up against the buildings. Some had even climbed the Rarnammon to gain vantage from its chariot wheels.

  Inside the body of the procession there was abruptly more room. Rem found he was advancing between the chariots as they widened their phalanx, and through them.

  Before he was quite through he felt the pulse of the earth stop. That was what it was like. The earth’s pulse, or his own. Then under the cheering and the hubbub, there came a low strong roar. At first, they mistook it for themselves.

  Then bells began to ring, the curiously noted stringed bells brought here from Koramvis. The bells knew the grasp of the earthquake, it had shaken them before. They seemed to be crying out a warning. It was recognized.

  All at once the screams of excitement turned to shrieks of horror. The crowd pushed against itself. He could hear the prayer-screams, too. “Anack! Anack!” The Xarabians of the entourage were if anything more afraid than the Vis of the city. This was not even their country that they be expected to die in it. Already all was out of control, beasts struggling and rearing, chariots dragged sideways, men tumbled, and the crowd on every side milling and howling, no one able to move. But the ground itself moving.

  The zeeba danced to keep its balance. Something of Rem’s iron command came through to it, just negating the primal urge to kick and run. He looked at the sky. A man was falling from the Rarnammon, screeching. He burst down into the crowd. The great statue, however, did not shift, only trembling at its roots, its human cargo clinging to it.

  Rem was through the chariots, up to the place where the rear guard of Iros’ soldiery had flanked the procession’s gaudy center, its core Ulis Anet’s ceremonial car. But something had happened to the order of the procession.

  One of the Yasmis carts had overturned. One of the Yasmis girls lay dead where a kalinx, expelled from the shafts and its tether snapped, had torn out her heart and stood now, in her blood and the crushed sweets, irresolute between fear and viciousness. No one had killed it. When the quake ended it might attack again. Rem leaned, met its glacial eyes, and swiftly cut its throat. He rode over the cadaver, the zeeba snorting, and into the clamor of mounted men beyond.

  The Xarabians were shouting, invoking gods. A sword, drawn to hack a passage somewhere, into another world maybe, where the earth was solid, slashed blind over his unmailed shoulder and drew blood. Rem turned and struck the sword-waver unconscious. As the man slumped, Rem saw across him to the garlanded chariot of the Princess. The driver was gone and the banners had fallen. Caught in the maelstrom it was pulled now one way now another, the panic-stricken chariot-animals, bred for strength in speed and little else, leaping and cavorting in the shafts, screaming as human women screamed all about. The reins were gone, she could not have taken them up even if she had had the weight to hold the team, which she did not. Beyond this, he saw again the flash of metal; swords were out everywhere. Iros and his captains were cutting a way to her through the crowd, their own men and the naked dancing girls.

  The quake was almost done, the earth merely shivering now, like a man after sickness. It needed only moments more for the complementary dousing of panic, a cold despairing relief, to come down on them. The beasts would feel it first.

  But before the dousing came, the freakish flailing of Iros’ guard had cleared a road before the Princess’ chariot. The animals did at once what they had wished to do all along, bolting forward, their screams trailing like torn flags. The very men who had striven toward her went down before them. Rem saw Iros dashed aside, the long glancing rip of his sword across the breasts of the team serving to madden them further.

  Rem touched his spurs against the zeeba. That was all it took. It rushed forward pell-mell as the chariot-animals had done.

  The chariot raced ahead, the girl holding to the sides. Ghastly addendum, one of the dancers, caught by her own long hair among the spokes of the wheel, was carried some way in tow over the paving. Her silence was due to death. But Ulis Anet made no sound, either.

  Before them, the royal panoply of the King. On foot, hemmed in and pressed against the first steps of the hill, they seemed set only to stare, those figurines, until the chariot ran into them.

  The bells had stopped tolling.

  Rem had been in enough skirmishes. It was familiar in essence if not in exactitude. And he knew what to do.

  Only a little thought went mocking through his occupied mind:

  Kesarh would have planned this.

  Then he was level with the pelting team.

  Swinging over, he brought his sword down on the inside animal’s brain, blade and arm with all the strength behind them he could spare. The beast went over at once, taking the sword with it out of his hand. The others were unable to stop, their momentum carrying them in a snarl across their dead fellow, the chariot slewing behind, all in his path. But he had already kneed the zeeba aside, and as she came by, her volcanic hair flying, he caught the girl up and out and across his mount.

  They were away even as the chariot went over. Wrapped in a tangle of traces the animals were flung across it, broken-spined in half a second.

  It was as well he had kept up the warrior’s training of Karmiss, Rem told himself wryly. He glanced with pity at the dead team. Wryness, pity—that was all. He felt no more than that.

  He stayed his mount and slid down from it smoothly, lifting the woman after him.

  She stared at him. “Thank you,” she said.

  “An honor, madam.”

  The inanity struck both of them. Standing on the square, amid spaces of white paving spilled with blood, a broken chariot, dead bodies, they both laughed bitterly.

  There was a tremendous soundlessness all about. Then a ragged cheer went up. The Xarabians, having botched the job, were congratulating a foreign stranger on saving precious Xarabian goods.

  From the palace end of the square, men were starting toward them.

  “Are you hurt?” Rem said to the Princess.

  “No. But you’re bleeding.”

  “Some fool with a sword. It’s nothing.”

  “It seems more than nothing.”

  “I, too, was a soldier, ma
dam,” he said for some reason. “I know when I’m hurt or not. But your solicitude is generous.”

  “The quake. . . . Is it over?” she asked him. He had become an authority on things, wounds, rescues, earthquakes. He smiled, nodded.

  Irrationally, this private conversation in the middle of pandemonium seemed relevant. Though it meant nothing, he could see how beautiful she was, still spear-straight and self-possessed.

  But her eyes drifted to the dead dancing girl and away. Her voice faltered now, before she mastered it.

  “Perhaps it’s an omen. I’ve heard when my future husband, the King, entered Anackyra as a boy, there was a violent tremor.”

  Something happened. It was intangible, invisible, deep as mortal illness.

  “What is it?” she said.

  But at that moment the group from the palace end of the square had reached them.

  Immediately Ulis Anet was encompassed. Rem discovered himself cordoned by a mass of men, Vis, Vathcrians. He could pick out none of the Lowland race. And then there was another man, exactly in front of him. He dressed in white as Ulis Anet had been, and a white cloak roped with a golden snake, the scales laid on like coins. His hair was whiter than his garments, but his skin was tawny as young wood. He had the beauty one had heard of, Raldnor Am Anackire’s looks, like a god. But there was no discrepancy in height. They were as tall as each other. So Rem looked at him eye to eye, and these eyes were the color of the glass in the eyeplaces of the Rarnammon.

  There had been muttering: “A Vis hero! Who is he? Who is this man?”

  Raldanash the Storm Lord said to him directly:

  “Who are you?”

  The city, if it had shaken in augury or not, had given the torch into his hand. He could no more quench it now than walk away.

  “My name is Rarmon,” he said. “I am your father’s son.”