by Tanith Lee
On the second night they ran into the three Lannic riders who had come to the wagon camp. They had now a bivouac of their own in a tall cave. There were five or six village men too, and seven women, and a quarrelsome pig. Everyone but the pig welcomed them heartily, without explanations.
They moved off before sunrise. The rain and storm winds, though making their own path treacherous, would help deter hunters. Apparently the Karmians were out on the lower hills, searching.
The guardian of Olm had been stripped of his drawers in the marketplace and given four blows with a rod. It had not done him good.
• • •
The first mountain flank, blue-gray, the hide of some primeval petrified beast, stretched dauntingly before them. Beyond, other mountains rose, a wall against the air.
There would be a pass, old as the hills themselves, partially choked by boulder-slips. Higher yet, there was an almost legendary way, carved hundreds of feet by nature, leveled by men. It was possible to get in and out of the Zor. The Zorians did so themselves, if seldom, peddlers, magicians, snake dancers, snakes.
They struggled all day, men, women, and zeebas, to climb that initial flank. The pig struggled not to climb it. At last, lamenting, the seven village women let it free. It cantered away, burping with rage, in a torrent of sliding stones.
They got over the flank in the sunset. The rain had paused. The sun descended blazing and red at their backs, laving the mountains before them.
After the sun had gone, pieces of it were seen to have remained, trapped in cracks and on spurs above.
They had reached the lower pass, and found the sprawling camp of Free Lan.
• • •
Safca started, nervous and defiant, meeting Yannul the hero. Even a momentary unworthy jealousy had filled her, for she had been both the mascot and the commander until now. They fury at herself—to be so petty. She seemed two persons, always at odds. But at least she was teaching herself how to have dialogue with her other self, to reason with it and tell it to be quiet.
And Yannul was an impressive man. The Amanackire woman had pleased the Olmish refugees, who paid her instant reverence. Safca was more able to accept this herself. Medaci reminded her somewhat of the Lowlander she had known, though they were very unlike in all things but coloring, and even that was not really the same. The guardian’s daughter did not mention the one named Ashni. It did not seem yet the time.
When eventually Yannul said, “You did so much, risked so much on the strength of a dream?” Safca challenged him across the fire: “Lord Yannul, so did you.”
His fine eyes fell. He looked tired and lined under his splendor.
“And I seem still to be doing it.”
He felt himself a faint distrust of Safca, an antagonism. He did not know what it was. She seemed honest, if impassioned, and had shown him so much honor he smiled.
Later, curled up with Medaci under an invented tent, he said, “Anack used to be a goddess of peace. Then She was a wargoddess. Now She instructs women to take up hairpins and knives and kill with them.”
Medaci shivered, and he was sorry. He was all too conscious that, in avoiding the phantoms of the Shadowless Plains, they had entered a situation uncannily similar. Olm, too, had slain its occupying garrison, and now sought to hide in a ruin. But then Medaci said, “That was Safca’s interpretation. So it was interpreted to us by Raldnor, in the past. To meet the sword with the sword. Perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps it’s another way Anackire shows us, but we never see it.”
He thought she fell asleep then, but after a while she said, “There was a story my grandmother told me, why the goddess is depicted with eight arms instead of two arms.”
“I’d heard it was from the spider,” he said. “Eight-armed, because the female spider is greater than the male.”
“No,” she said, laughing a little. He was glad of her laugh. “The story is this. An innocent came by chance into a grove on the Plains and found Anackire seated there. Being an innocent, he was not afraid, and the goddess was kind. They talked and presently he asked Her why, in Her statues, She was shown as eight-armed, seeing She was before him in the grove with only two arms. And Anackire replied: ‘It is because you are innocent that you see me in such a way. But the statues are carven by men who have seen me through other eyes.’ Then the innocent apologized, saying he didn’t understand her. Anackire answered, ‘My words you do not understand. My Self you do.’”
Yannul lay a long time, holding her, listening to the small noises of the exhausted camp. What she had said grew warm and drifting. Again he thought she slept, until she murmured, “Lur Raldnor.” But then she did sleep, and he soon slept, and forgot.
• • •
Five days along the pass, having negotiated fallen boulders, crawled through apertures, climbed over tremendous rock heaps, coaxing or forcing the zeebas and what livestock remained to them, they came out on an open platform of stone and were able to look down the long fraught way they had already come. It had not been an auspicious day. One of the unstable slips they had had to climb had tilted. A man was flung into a ravine below the pass. Although they had got the zeebas free, the cart had slithered after him, laden with flour and salted meat. At least, they did not scream as they fell. The man’s wife kept up for several miles the high desolate keening that might be used to mark death, until Safca, walking back to her on blistered feet, had reasoned grief to silence.
When fires were lit at dusk on the platform of stone, some Olmians looked down across the stony sides below. They were even able to make out the flank of the first mountain they had scaled. Before too long, they were also able to make out the many campfires spread along the entry to the pass.
“Karmians,” said Yannul.
The Lan who had been an officer in the Olmish palace guard, next a levy recruit, now a captain of this unmilitary march, considered. “They’re five days behind us.”
“They’re also lighter. We’ve got children, women, beasts, baggage. I’ve had dealings with a man who served Kesarh Am Karmiss. He said little, but his reactions were eloquent. If I were in Kesarh’s army, I wouldn’t want to let him down, either.”
They resumed progress two hours before dawn.
Yannul consulted the Zorish girl who was their guide. She was a strange creature, with black whiplike hair—snakelike hair, as her movements were snakelike. The Karmians had butchered her snake at Olm from superstitious dislike. One heard, the snakepits were gone from the temples of Istris. Very little was known of a Zor dancer’s relation with the serpent partner, but it had long been accepted among scholars as a spiritual one. The snake could be a familiar, conceivably a friend. The girl was full of wordless anger and woe, and this added to the difficulties of stilted speech. The Zor spoke the Vis tongue, but wound into some older or parallel language, its accent more appealing but less understandable than the guttural slur of Ommos, Zakoris or Alisaar. To make matters worse, the girl had never seen her own land. Her mother bore her in Lan and taught her there the snake dance. Though she knew of the passes, Vashtuh had never used them, until now.
“The upper pass, do you remember how far it should be, Vashtuh?”
“Ten days, and then ten days,” she said. Or he thought she did.
“How do we find it?”
“A cave. Through the mountain.”
It rained. The rain turned to hail, daggers flashing through the air, striking starbursts of pallid fire from the sides of the mountains that now went up sheer to either side of them. Sometimes stones fell, causing minor abrasions and substantial panic.
They knew the Karmian detachment was behind them, knowing them to be ahead, though the route curved—it was no longer feasible for one group to glimpse the other.
Moving almost constantly now, they realized, however, the Karmians would have encroached on the separating distance.
The Lannic officer o
rganized fifty men who were willing to block the pass, delaying the pursuit, maybe annihilating it. They approached Yannul, who had the diplomacy himself to approach Safca. “We saw the Karmian campfires,” he said to her, “those we could see. Fifty-one men will hold the pass for fifteen minutes. And they’ll be fifty-one men we’ve lost.”
She accepted him as counselor and with his personality to back her, refused the others leave to act.
On the twenty-third day, worn out, some sick, all sick at heart, and the hail again smashing about them, there was no evidence of the cave Vashtuh had said signaled the higher pass. Only the rock walls going up sheer, the somber peaks beyond, no longer blue, and the memory of Kesarh’s men on the road behind them.
Shortly after dawn on the twenty-fourth day there was a new mountain, directly in their path. A stone-slip had come down there, probably the year before, dislodged by snow. There was no way round it, no way up or over it. The only use it would serve would be to put their backs to when the Karmians arrived.
• • •
“I had a dream,” said Yannul’s younger son. “I saw the other side of the mountain. There’s a huge valley. It must be the Zor. It must mean we’ll find a way through.”
Yannul did not say anything. He could only have said, “That’s the closest you’ll come to it, now.” He had other things on his mind. He was wondering if, in the final extremity, he should kill them, his wife and son, to save them from atrocities the Karmians might inflict. One did not hear of such atrocities too often, save from Free Zakoris. The Amanackire were sacred. But maybe not here, where none but Karmians would live to tell of it. Kesarh had ousted Ashara-Anack from eminence in the fanes of Istris. Besides, Yannul recollected the burning village the caravan had negotiated. No, the Amanackire might not be sacred here.
But to kill her, to kill the boy—Yannul’s throat scalded with bile. He did not know what to do, so he went on listening.
“There is a city, you can see it far off. It’s big, but fallen. Black stone, like in the Lowlands. You said the Lowland city was black, didn’t you, father?”
“Yes,” said Yannul.
“But the valley was fertile. There were fruits growing, and I saw sheep, and orynx. And a river.”
“They say an abandoned city is like a broken sword,” said the Olmish officer. Yannul had not seen him come up. “It rusts, rots away. But it wasn’t like that. It felt alive. There was a light there. Did you see that, too?”
“Yes,” said Yannul’s younger son. “A kind of flame on the ruin, when it got dark.”
“A city of fire then,” said someone else. “Not rust.”
Yannul’s belly clenched.
“You’re saying you had the same dream, the two of you—and my son?”
“Maybe. What about you, Lord Yannul?”
Yannul hesitated. At the back of his mind something stirred. In sleep he had thought it was the Lowland city, and had been puzzled because—because a river ran across the plain—
A hundred feet away, Medaci was standing by Safca. Beyond them, a man was running along the pass from the lower end.
Yannul got up and went over.
The man gasped for breath and said, “My zeeba fell. Dead. I ran for miles. They’re almost here. A hundred of them, more. They saw my mate. Spear shot got him. Didn’t see me. Not that it makes any difference, lady. I dreamed of it all last night, dropping asleep in the saddle, seeing the valley. But we’ll never get there now.”
There was a wash of sound. They had all had the dream apparently, but many were only just discovering. Mind-speech was not recognized among Lans. A mental link of such magnitude was unconscionable, therefore sorcerous, therefore, at some level, absurdly acceptable and accepted.
Safca climbed one of the tumbled rocks. Standing higher than the rest of them, she raised her arms.
Yannul looked at her, the philosophical part of him awed, the man amused.
When she became a priestess, this unbeautiful woman changed. A sun seemed to rise behind her face, her whole body, and to be channeled out upon them. She must have looked like this the night they killed the Karmians at Olm. Transfigured.
Suddenly he heard a woman from his past speaking inside his head. “None of us could harm him. He is his god’s. And the gods protect their own.” She had been referring to Raldnor. Raldnor walking back from the forest of the second continent, branded by Anackire.
Safca began to cry out to them. She was telling them the goddess was near and would save them.
The wind and the bad weather had stopped, and she was clearly visible, audible. It was no trance, no rolling of the eyes, wriggling, salivating, howling. She was in command of herself, disciplining herself instinctually that the wondrous energy might pass through her and to them, unsullied.
It was not her power. Someone had trained her. Or gifted her—
It was like something of Raldnor’s. Something he might have passed on to his sons. But Rem had been the son of Raldnor. Beyond that princely and striking but quite human aura, the often striking, not always quite human good looks. Rem had had nothing of this, or seemed not to. Raldanash, seen as a boy, had been more of Raldnor’s way, yet he was heatless as dead coals. Raldnor, even Raldnor as a god, had never been that.
Yannul had loved Raldnor as a brother, but with more love than he had ever felt for the loved brothers of his flesh.
The love had never gone, though Raldnor had left all their lives a generation ago.
Why think of this now?
The Olmians were moved by Safca, electrified. But Yannul had not even heard her. Yet he heard something. Something that had no sound.
He had heard it previously. On the plain under Koramvis, the night before the last battle. The silent strumming of the air, the earth, over and over.
Power.
He felt suddenly young as he had been then, afraid as then, and with a new fear astride the first. Something would happen. He could not see why it should, but it would. Energy, power—and death. An avalanche, perhaps, tearing the mountains out by their roots, burying the Karmian soldiery who hunted them, simply because they were ordered to do so, would commit atrocities upon them because they were scared and cowardice invented evil.
He partly turned. They were all turning, to face toward the lower end of the pass, from which the Karmians would come.
Yannul glimpsed his son. The fine young face was open and savage with strength, a man’s face, a demon’s. Yannul wanted to shout. Whatever they confronted, this was no answer. To meet sword with sword, prevent death by death. They had killed Koramvis and the might of the Vis, and the world was altered, and had brought this, more killing, more pain. Endless. A circle of fire.
“No,” she said. Who was it now? The hand slipped into his was cool and sure. “In the Lowland city, Raldnor made us kill. I recall so well. In my sleep I’ve lived it again and again. But this isn’t like that.”
Medaci.
He was himself now like a child, and clung to her hand.
The wind rose, then.
And around the slight curve of the mountain pass, the Karmians appeared.
• • •
The Karmians had had a harsh journey up from the foothills, but had suffered no casualties. They knew perseverance was expected of them.
Their leader, who had been appointed to his post months before by Kesarh himself, was yet galvanized by the meeting, and had imparted some of his dedication to his soldiers. The plan was to slaughter all male Olmians. The women would be sent as slaves to Karmiss, or put to similar work with the army of occupation.
Coming up around the pass and seeing the huddle of humanity before them, their backs literally to a wall, the leader kept his zeeba to a walking pace, allowing the entire Karmian force to fill the pass and so to fill the sight of the Olmians. From here, he would presently command his javelins into position. The
y could take out a random selection of the rebels as a precedent, before the detachment moved in to a more tidy execution.
Before this could be arranged, the leader noticed a man standing on the stone track, exactly between rebels and soldiery.
It was odd, since he had not seemed to come forward from the rebel side, and certainly could not have climbed down the mountain steeps unseen. From some cave, maybe.
The leader held up his hand to halt the column. There was a problem here. The man was a mix Vis, almost black, but his mane of hair was blond-white and even from here, the eyes were seen to be pale and peculiarly brilliant.
Unwillingly, the leader became aware of muffled exclamations and curses behind him. He even fancied he caught the phrase of a frightened prayer. As this went on, his own skin started to crawl along his neck. Then he knew why. The man on the pass ahead of them wore the dragon-mail of Old Koramvis. He was tall, had the look of a king, and the face of a god—
Behind the leader now, they were kneeling, some of them. Zeebas were shying, officers bawling for order, their voices cracked with shock.
The man on the track was Raldnor Am Anackire.
The leader strove to control his mount. He would have to do something, but what?
Then everything was taken from his hands.
Behind the figure of the god-hero, a gleam began to burnish the air. Gradually the world faded, leaving only this gleam, which touched the sky. A second figure formed within it. It was the figure of the serpent goddess, Ashara-Ashkar-Anackire, the Lady of Snakes.
Rather than screaming, the men of Karmiss had fallen utterly quiet, and motionless. The leader was caught in this same weird grip. He did not feel afraid. He felt a terror, but it was almost ecstatic.
The colossal apparition had not completely solidified. She was translucent. Despite that, She was not as they had heard or ever been shown Her. Her skin was dark, a Lannic skin of brass. Her hair was black, and the great tail black-scaled, with a coiling gold design across it, stammering and alive. But her eyes were amber, and fixed upon them, from out of the sky.