by Tanith Lee
Rarmon let both stimuli fade with a sense of conscious divorce.
Eight and a half years were gone. It might anyway mean nothing now, Val Nardia’s red-haired double seated before Kesarh at a banquet table.
• • •
Long after sunset, the rain swept down on the splendid little makeshift camp by the river.
In the King’s pavilion, fifty-six dishes were presented. There were even dancing girls from Dorthar, and Kumaian girls to serve the wine. But the officers had not brought their ladies, and the Storm Lord’s minor consort was also absent.
His message had come with the lighting of the lamps. Raldanash politely commanded her to avoid the pavilion. The occasion was festive but no longer social.
By the time the first concordance of dishes was carried out empty and the next relay gone into the great tent, loud with music and lights, she had heard the talk, Raldanash’s aides having been unable to contain it. Unbridled gossip scarcely counted. All Dorthar must presently learn.
Politics did not interest Ulis Anet, since she was required to play such a cursory role in them. She had felt no curiosity. Kesarh Am Karmiss was a name. That it promised to be the name of a tyrant and foe made her the more averse to contact with him, but even that merely in a desultory way.
Yet she was restless, and the confining tent, from which she had dismissed her women, did not please her.
Outside one of Iros’ men stood guard in the rain.
She considered her life as it was to be from now on, and to her humiliation found herself weeping. She had anticipated nothing; it was foolish to mourn because she had been wise.
• • •
The man stood brushing water from his cloak.
“Good evening,” Rarmon said, “Biyh.”
“Magnificent gods, Rem, I never thought you’d know me still.”
“And you’re still not thinking, Biyh. I’m no longer called ‘Rem.’”
The soldier from Istris faltered. Resentful, then resigned.
“Yes, you’ve come up in the world. I’m sorry, my lord.”
“Well,” Rarmon said, “you’re here from Kesarh. What does he want?”
“To see you.”
“He saw me at dinner.”
“Privately, Lord Rem—Rarmon.”
“No.”
Biyh goggled at him. He had been another Nine in Kesarh’s secret army. Unlike Rem, he had not particularly gone up in the world, being yet a soldier and a go-between.
“But my lord—” he broke out.
“Your King,” said Rarmon, “is aware how it will look if I’m come on skulking to or from his tent. I’m no longer in his pay. Be so helpful as to remind him.”
Biyh continued for a moment more, unbelieving. Then he went back into the rain.
Rarmon sat in the chair and waited.
There was a chance Kesarh might want to kill him, but assassination was unlikely here. This ground was diplomatic and acute, too brittle to withstand stray murders.
But the intrinsic information had not yet come. It could not be evaded.
He knew what Kesarh would do.
Less than half an hour later, two noisy torches evolved from the splashing night. Shouts were exchanged with Rarmon’s own men outside, one of whom tried to come in and was got from the way. Instead one of Kesarh’s guard strode in, set down a great jar of wine and withdrew. After him, Kesarh entered.
He seemed to fill the tent with an electric darkness. The impression was aphysical but overpowering.
This was how Rarmon had seen him last, at Istris, removing a wet cloak, the focus of the lamps, and the shadows.
“Our approach was well-lit and not quiet,” said Kesarh. “Your King doubtless already knows I’m here, and that he’s been let know it.”
Rarmon indicated the wine jar.
“Doctored? Or do I only merit a knife in the back?”
Kesarh looked at him.
“Stand up,” he said.
Slowly, and without emphasis, Rarmon stood.
Kesarh’s face gave no hint, no clue.
He said: “Now tell me where you left my sister’s child.”
Rarmon gathered himself who he had been, what he might be now, ordered these men and gave them speech.
“In Lan, my lord.”
“Where in Lan?”
“Pirates took Dhol’s ship. You’ll have heard of it. I got her to the shore. The girl went off with her when I slept.”
“You say you failed me, then. Did you search?”
“I searched.”
Kesarh gave him space to go on, and eventually said, “And found what?”
“Wolves.”
Rarmon brought out the word, and the claws of some fateful inexplicable thing closed on him. Why did he mislead? Because the supernatural alternative would not be acceptable? Because he hated Kesarh, or because he was still bound to Kesarh?
Perhaps Kesarh did not care, the child simply a loose end to be tied or cut away, no more. As Rarmon was a loose end to be killed or forgotten. Or killed and forgotten.
“And you didn’t dare come to me and tell me this,” Kesarh said at last.
“As you point out, I’d failed.”
“And then, after all, you discovered your heritage. And were able to convince Raldanash. I’ve heard he isn’t partial to women. Is that it?”
They were in Istris. This could be no other place.
Rarmon said nothing, and presently Kesarh took up one of the gold cups from a side table, and filled it from the wine jar. He drank without interest or thirst.
“Obviously,” he said, “it’s suggested itself to me you may already have known who you were in Karmiss. That you may have been gathering some sort of information to bring as a gift to your Lowlander-Vathcrian King.”
“No,” said Rarmon.
“On the other hand,” said Kesarh, handing him the tasted cup, “you could remain in Dorthar and send information as your gift to me.”
The rain was slackening. A train of thunder wracked the sky and ended twenty hills away.
“Lord Kesarh,” Rarmon said, “I’ve already proven an inadequate servant. Don’t dismiss what else I am. He and I are brothers.”
“Yes, you always were a prince, my Rem. Thief and cutthroat and mercenary. And prince.”
“And the son of Raldnor Am Anackire,” said Rarmon.
Kesarh’s eyes stayed on his, and then Am Karmiss reached out again and took back the cup Rarmon had not drunk from. Deliberately, Kesarh poured the wine on to the rugs. Tossing the cup to the table, he walked out of the tent.
Kesarh, Lord of Karmiss and Protector of Lan, returned across the Dortharian side of the encampment, toward the more modest Karmian bivouac over the river. His torches scrawled smoke behind him. The rain was finished.
The Storm Lord’s pavilion stood near the narrow stone bridge. Close by they had put up the tent of the latest surplus royal bride. The arms of Xarabiss glinted, catching light; the flaps had been pulled back to let in rain-washed coolness. Encased by the dark lamp-shine inside the tent, a woman sat reading.
The silhouetted image momentarily distracted Kesarh. Then was set aside.
• • •
In the last hour of that night season the Lowlanders called the Wolf-Watch, Kesarh came out of sleep and lay, his eyes wide on blackness.
He had been dreaming of Val Nardia’s witchcraft baby, or maybe only of the dead Prince-King, Emel. Kesarh could not reassemble the dream. It was already gone. But it had left him strung and tensed as if for violent action.
He rose, and drank from the ewer of wine and water.
While he did so, he painted for himself on the dark the face of a dying blond boy, and observed it, without remorse. Emel had been afraid, and had seemed to guess, even at nine years of age, tha
t he was not expiring of plague but from something more contrived.
Beyond the palace, the crowds were already shouting for Kesarh. When Emel sank in coma, his regent left the death-bed. The next Kesarh saw of the child was the box of spices in which he had been hastily packed. The weather had reached its hottest. Kesarh malignly awarded Suthamun’s son a Vis tomb in the Karmian Hall of Kings, rather than Shansarian cremation. A draped coffin became necessary, the embalmers Raldnor Am Ioli had dispatched declaring a strangely poisonous corruption consumed the body, rendering their work impossible. These mutterings were swiftly quieted. Instead, when Kesarh spoke the funeral oration, the rabble wept. A month later it had shrieked him to the throne of Istris.
Emel’s memory dissolved.
It was the other child which had waylaid his sleep.
When Kesarh left the tent, the first pre-dawn pallor was in the sky. Men were already beginning to move about. At sunrise, the Karmians would depart. Aims were achieved. Dorthar had been assessed, and shown she was prepared to come courting.
Kesarh walked away from both campments, along the bank. Trees grew and tall, thick-stemmed reeds with tasseled heads. Night clung to the earth. The river, swelled a very little by the rain, ran shallowly over its stones.
Kesarh stood among the trees, looking down at the water.
The memory of the child would not go away. It was ironical, he had cared nothing for it. He had taken fewer pains with it than he had taken with Emel, whom he had killed. Even the sorcery had lost its impact, become unimportant. Years back, hearing of Dhol’s wreck, he had thought it dead.
Something glimmered in the shadow on the opposite bank.
So Kesarh looked up and saw, across the twilight and the low race of folding water, Val Nardia his sister.
The initial shock was nothing, like a blow, no more, for she might be unreal, imagined. But then awareness rushed to fill the void. The crepuscular sheen described her, the river held fragments of her reflection. She existed. The second shock was not sudden, a smooth rapid draining, just such as he had felt when told of her death. It left him hollow, and hollow he moved off the bank into the river.
It seemed she took half a step in retreat as he crossed toward her. But the half step was meaningless. The river was a symbol, crossing it another. She must remain, and remain she did, poised on the low shelf of rock, watching him, until he walked out of the water on to the rock and stood over her less than a foot away, and took her arms in his hands and felt silk and flesh and mortal warmth. Light was sinking through the treetops and the red of her hair, red as that Karmian flower, was the first color to come alive in the world.
“Ulis,” he said.
Hearing him speak her name, Ulis Anet could only stare at him. She seemed paralyzed, or enchanted, and could not even attempt to pull herself from his grasp.
She had lain awake all night, stifled by the tent, too tired to rise, her nerves too quickened to allow sleep. In the hour before dawn something had sent her in flight from the tent and the King’s camp. It was ill-considered, the deed of an adolescent. She had even left the guard, and concluding she sought the King, the guard had not argued. Now, alone and unprotected, she reached the margin of this emblematic river, and from the black wood had come a man clothed in black. That he was one of the Karmian’s officers she decided at once. Her own position was horrible. She meant to withdraw immediately, then she saw, even over the distance and in the dark, his eyes.
That was how he held her, merely by looking at her. His intensity, a compound of exceptional personal force directed solely at her, deprived her of volition. Stupidly she stood and awaited him, until he came out of the water on to the rock and took her by the arms.
The human contact was vital. Appalled at her own willingness, she gave in and let the power that streamed from his overwhelm her. She did not know him, but she had heard yesterday’s descriptions, and suddenly she recognized him as the Karmian King. In that moment he spoke her name.
His voice was a low rough sigh. Dimly and unreasonably she sensed that, while he was a stranger, she was not.
She could say nothing, do nothing.
“You’re not,” he said, “a ghost. So how are you here?”
His voice was level now, but the intensity sheared through it as through the black, devouring eyes.
Not a ghost—am someone dead for him, she thought. Still no words would come. She shook her head, and felt the grasp of his hands tighten on her.
“She’s lying in a mausoleum at Istris,” he said. “You can’t be her.” And, with a peculiar shift to mildness, almost casually: “Who are you, then?”
Her voice came from her, before she realized she could speak.
“You called me by my name.”
“Ulis,” he said.
Begun, the words came flooding, titles, meaning nothing at such an hour: “Ulis Anet Am Xarabiss, daughter of Thann Xa’ath, wife to Raldanash.” Is that, she thought, who I am?
His color had come back. The power persisted, beating on her like a dark sun, but the look which had been almost madness, that had ebbed away.
“One of the Storm Lord’s wives,” he said. He did not relinquish her, not the grip of hands, or eyes.
“But who is it,” she said, “that you believed me to be?”
“Not believed. That you are.”
“No,” she said, and for the first time struggled.
He meditated upon her, hands not slackening, until again she gave in.
“You must have been a child,” he said, “when she died. You’re the age now that she was then, Ulis Anet, wife of Raldanash of Dorthar.”
“Let me go,” she said, “my Lord Kesarh.”
He smiled a little, and his hands were gone. The marrow of her bones seemed to go with them.
It was an effort to turn from him. She constrained herself to do so, and then to move through the trees away from him. She knew herself the focus of his eyes, they mesmerized her, even now she did not see them. At the edge of the open hill she must look over her shoulder.
The sun had risen, he was blacker now than the shadows of the trees. It seemed to her he could have summoned her, drawing her soul toward him by means of some invisible nexus.
Once more she convinced herself to turn away.
The steps she took toward the Storm Lord’s camp were leaden and without strength.
• • •
Storms emphasized the journey to Anackyra.
The titbit rendered the Storm Lord in a black tent on the Kumaian hills, was now vehemently debated in the capital. Zakoris-In-Thaddra loomed on one side, Karmiss-In-Lan towered on the other.
Two such blades might close like pincers on the Middle Lands.
A dozen days after Raldanash’s arrival in the city, a convoy of three ships put out on the Inner Sea from Dorthar’s small western port of Thos. Their destination was the Sister Continent, and the bulk of their cargo was news. But it would be an embassy, to and fro, of months. Such ballast was precarious at best.
Storms tore Anackyra’s sky, and her council chambers.
Yannul’s son, standing in the princely apartments of Rarmon, said with desperate quietness, “He means to leave Lan spilled in the dirt under the Karmian’s heel.”
“Raldanash’s enemy is Free Zakoris,” Rarmon said. “Dorthar won’t expend her might against Karmiss. She dare not. Move troops out to Lan and Yl’s navy would come in on Dorthar behind them like high tide.”
“So Lan stays a chattel. You must be proud of your old master, Rem.”
This gauntlet was taken no notice of. “What do you mean to do?” was all Rarmon said.
“Go to Lan, what else? No letters can get through, nor have they. My family is there, and he’s given me little enough here. My father tried to warn me. I should have listened.”
“Would you listen to me?”
“You?” Lur Raldnor looked at him with youth’s blasting disdain. “I don’t know anymore which you run with, sir.”
“None.”
“Kesarh went to your tent with much show.”
“I left him no choice but to make a show of it. Which is how you, and the King, learned of the business.”
“Maybe. You must forgive my bad manners. I’m angry, you see. I do know this. Raldanash can strip me of my name but not my blood. I have his leave. I’m going home.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.” Lur Raldnor took one long breath, and was altered. “I’m sorry,” he said, “You wouldn’t even be in this corner of the earth if we hadn’t argued it.” His eyes were steady and clear. Rarmon sensed an invocation of that night in Zastis on Yannul’s terrace, the fireflies, and some feeling that was gone and would not come back. “Rem,” Lur Raldnor said, and now it was oversight not sarcasm, “you do understand that you put this mile of space between us, and not I? I’ve been listening since Amlan. You had only to call on me. You never have.”
“You never told me what you were offering me. The one thing I’d have taken I don’t think you could give.”
“There were other things. Perhaps you didn’t want those. Just something like sex when you needn’t look at my face or remember I can reason or that I’m alive, as you are. I still recall that time you said it was easier to kill a man than a beast.”
They stood without speaking then, until Lur Raldnor turned for the door.
“It’ll take forever if I have to sail from Xarabiss. But they say ships are putting in at Karith again.”
15.
UNDER THE HEEL OF KARMISS, Lan shone with unaccustomed armaments. The unusual dust of marital passage contended with indigenous rain. The major garrison installed at Amlan currently occupied one of the larger warehouses of the port. A second detail was beneath tentage in the palace park. Elsewhere, substantial droves of Karmian military were lodged at every significant town. The highways between were patrolled, for Free Zakorians would, if they came, come to any spot and in any disguise. In the smaller villages, men were robbed and women abused in case they might hold Free Zakorian sympathies. Such offenses of the soldiery were localized, but severely punished by the Karmian High Command, when they could be proved. Which was very seldom.