by Tanith Lee
“Why,” she said, “did you—”
“You know why.”
She met his eyes not meaning to. He and she were yards apart. She looked aside from him and her blood seemed full of water.
“I recall for you some woman who died.”
He said nothing.
I, too, should have died, she thought, before I submitted to this. But the idea was empty, a fallacious ritual. Even to her it seemed sickeningly coy.
There came a plea outside the door, and he told them to come in. Unknown servitors appeared; a lavish meal was set out. That seen to, Kesarh sent them away.
He indicated the table.
“And chance some other drug or potion? No, my lord.”
“You mean to starve yourself for virtue’s sake.”
Their eyes met again.
“Don’t suppose,” she said, “I can willingly accept anything of yours.”
He came toward her then, crossing over the bright room as over the lightless river. He did not touch her. He said, “Starvation’s a slow, comfortless way.” He drew the dagger from his belt and offered it as courteously as he had offered the wine. “She killed herself,” he said. “Why not you?”
Ulis Anet did not look at the dagger. It had no value for her. She knew she could never employ death. The words meant more.
“Who was she?” she said.
“My sister.”
She tried to shrink from him.
“You offered rape to your sister? She preferred suicide.”
“What else?”
She gazed at him, striving to see through him to mockery or rage or pain. But she could not; he was like Raldanash in that.
Only the heat beneath the cold darkness was not the same at all.
She must not attempt to force his hand with her, push him to violence or the rape she had mooted like an invocation. Again, it would be too easy. She could give in to superior strength and need not blame herself.
“Allow me to withdraw,” she said.
Even that might exacerbate. She had sounded cool and meek, colorless—she lowered her eyes. It was difficult to do.
“There’s no need for that,” he said. He was dangerously urbane now. “I’ll dine elsewhere.” He walked to the door. She did not look up. She did not know that in the modest gown, her long hair down her back, face unpainted, she was more than ever an image of Val Nardia, that morning when she had departed for Ankabek. By the door, he said, “Tomorrow I’m sending you to a house nearer the capital. It’s pleasant, and there’s a decent road. Anything you want can be got for you.”
“Let me have passage back to Dorthar, then,” she said to Raldnor Am Ioli’s mosaic floor.
“Forget Dorthar. When the war’s done I’ll give you Karmiss.”
The astonishment of it made her, after all, stare at him.
“Yes,” he said, “My first Consort, Chief Queen of Karmiss, Lan, Elyr, and any other ground that’s then in my possession. Did you think I brought you all this way to serve the wine?”
The door was opened and once more firmly shut.
Kesarh had left her alone with the dinner, and with her thoughts.
• • •
Far from his estate that night, Raldnor Am Ioli stood in his bedchamber at Amlan, reading dispatches, while a nervous Lannic girl crawled under the bedcovers.
There had been reports of rebels in Lanelyr killing the occupying soldiers, escaping up some mountain and now safe behind a convenient rock-fall. Strange stories had apparently attached to the phenomenon. He supposed he would have to look into it, at some juncture.
He was getting lazy, was Raldnor.
One area, however, where he had remained careful, was the discretion with which he bedded the local girls. This one had been smuggled in and would be smuggled out before sunrise. It would not do for Raldnor’s soldiers to become informed that, though he had brought a favorite mistress all the way from home, he never went to bed with her.
Some, of course, might have liked to. For some, Mella’s sort would always have attractions.
Thinking of his insurance, this most brilliant hazard of his life, Raldnor set the dispatches aside.
Mella.
There must come a time when Kesarh would overreach himself and the heavens crash down. And that would be when Raldnor the King-Maker would lift his gem from the rubble.
The embalmers, who were not embalmers, had got their trade in Ommos and were accomplished. Their covering lies of corruption and poison Kesarh himself had silenced. The child, stupefied with medicines that were not quite those Kesarh had authorized, had slipped into a coma that did not actually preface death. It was an empty box Kesarh had glanced at, sufficiently scented with foulness from a recent and genuine plague-corpse that he did not investigate further. Why should he, anyway? Raldnor had been trusted to perform murder before and seen to it, impeccably. A vacant weighted coffin was buried in the Hall of Kings.
Hygienically and caringly cut, the boy regained consciousness a eunuch. He grew up in the backlands of Ioli, soon female enough to pass for a woman save in the most intimate of situations.
Given intelligent handling, one day the Prince-King Emel might regain the throne of Istris.
Though, being what he was, it was unlikely he could keep it.
The dreadful truth would be found out, and Raldnor, who had waited so long in the wings, could stride across him into glory.
Kesarh had enfranchised Raldnor. Raldnor did not brood on it, but he was no longer the same man who, hearing the slaves shrieking in the blazing galleys at Tjis, had been honorably dismayed. Learning it was workable, a certain latent cruelty had come to Raldnor’s surface. He could now indulge, along with a taste for power Kesarh had taught him by example, the callousness and the infliction of pain which, to Kesarh, were tools not toys.
Raldnor himself enjoyed his sadism, as the Lannic bed-girl was about to discover.
Book Four
The Black Leopard
17.
IT WOULD BE SNOWING in Dorthar. It did not snow here. The summer lasted longer, here. Winter never came.
They had crossed by the ancient Pass through the mountains. The Dortharian side was well-guarded, the frequent lookout towers hewn from and perched on the rock, bristling with spears. Even coming down into Thaddra there were Dortharian outposts. Caal the Zakorian was known, however; he had been this way before, with a council seal of Anackyra on his person, and all the correct passwords. It was quite true he was a spy for the Storm Lord. In Free Zakoris he was reckoned a spy of King Yl’s. In this way, Caal got about pretty adequately, sometimes alone, sometimes with servants. He had two guards this time, and a slave.
The private guards were of the light Vis darkness most common in Xarabiss or Karmiss. The slave was a little darker, maybe a Dortharian. He was also disobedient or slothful or careless, for he had been recently beaten. His face was a mass of bruises and old blood, and his strong back, where rags of clothing revealed it, showed old whip scars. He was chained at the ankles too, with just enough slack between the chafing irons to plod. He carried the baggage, while the first guard rode ahead. The second guard and Caal rode behind the slave, and now and then Caal flicked him with the starchy-tongued flail generally kept for flies.
Coming off the Pass, they reached Tumesh, then moved roughly westward. The best mode of travel through the jungles of Thaddra was by poled raft along a selection of her several rivers, such roads as there were being half-choked by growing plants. Before Yl and his armies made their strike into Thaddra these roads had been cleared more assiduously, but for a couple of decades, Thaddra had preferred inaccessibility in all directions. Finding rivers and rafts, Caal’s party pressed gradually on.
The sun seemed to come in black through the great trees, the roping creeper and colossal ferns. The water was like treacle, poisonous to drink,
and full as a soup of reptiles. Faintly visible sometimes through gaps in the foliage, Vis’ northern mountains drew away.
By day they broiled. The nights were cooler and feverish with nocturnal life.
But in Dorthar it would be cold now, snowing, now.
• • •
The initial beating had been allotted for purposes of disguise. “You see, my lord,” Caal said, when they had got up into the foothills above Koramvis, “someone might recognize you. But with your face swollen, blood all over it—well, even your own brother’d have trouble.”
He was already chained, but the five Karmians held him, for good measure. He still used a couple of tricks they had not looked for, and one had fallen over screaming with a shattered kneecap. But the leg-irons told. Eventually Rarmon gave in and let Caal proceed with his beating. It was pointless to put off and so prolong the inevitable.
Caal reminded Rarmon, as he punched and slashed, of the blow Rarmon had awarded him in the palace.
When the camouflaging marks began to fade, the beating was repeated. There were, too, other pastimes later. Each night, making their camp, they would tie Rarmon some distance from the fire. Caal would bring him a share of food, and leave it on the ground just out of reach. After first attempts to take the food, Rarmon desisted and did not bother with it. Since Caal had told him he had been paid to present this captive in Free Zakoris, as Kesarh’s gift to Yl, and since Karmians remained with them to make sure of it, he would have to feed his prisoner sometime, and did.
Caal was disappointed in Rarmon. He resorted to other less subtle tortures. He was limited in this, too, by the need to keep his goods basically unflawed. He hit on the trick of making a shallow cut in Rarmon’s thigh or arm and stanching the blood with salt. When the cut was almost healed, he would open it again, exactly along the line of the original wound. Sometimes, he used vinegar instead of salt.
The Karmians, men Rarmon had never known, sat by the fire dicing, ignoring it all. They had no interest in Caal’s hobby, and no disapproval. They were risking their lives, going into Yl’s kingdom, but Kesarh had ordered it.
“You wish you were untied, I expect. Like to kill me, I expect,” Caal said. As they approached Free Zakoris, his Zakorian slur was slinking back. He no longer called his slave Rarmon, but Raurm. “Like to kill me slowly, eh, Raurm, bit by bit.”
But Rarmon had no desire to kill his tormentor. He felt only the familiar gray hatred and aversion and that terrible acceptance of both, and of pain, in which Lyki had seemed to tutor him. He did not resist anymore, even in his thoughts. For you found that through abnegation, the beating always ended sooner.
It was all so similar, the dark sunlight, the thick sweating vegetation—breached less and less by squat hutments, barren fields—the rivers and the forest paths where he and the guard and Caal himself worked with knives to get through; even the tortures were similar. Rarmon had long lost track of time. He was aware only that winter must have the Middle Lands and the east. Perhaps they had been two months traveling.
Then there began to be burned clearings in the jungle, wooden towers with guards, river fords patrolled, and narrow dirt roads that were passable. Watchwords came to be needed. The men who demanded them were black or blackly brazen, mostly blow-sculpted of feature and thin-lipped. Caal’s party was approaching the outskirts of Free Zakoris.
Yl son of Igur had got his kingship in the usual Zakorian way, fighting with Igur’s other eldest sons. Yl won the contest by breaking his brothers’ backs. He had taken three hundred wives to his throne with him, and crowned his first queen for slitting the throat, while heavy with his child, of a swamp leopard. So Zakoris had been, and still was, here in the northwest.
When Hanassor had capitulated to Sorm of Vardath, Yl, with some nine thousand men, their women and brats trailing after, had pushed a way through Zakorian swamplands and over the low mountains that bordered southern Thaddra, down into the jungles beyond. He lost three thousand men as they went, in rear-guard battles against Sorm’s harrying troops, or merely devoured by swamp fever or the treacherous variety of landscape. Countless women and children perished, too. In accordance with Zakorian ideology, the sick and the weak were sloughed from their flight.
Thaddra was a lawless land. For centuries she had paid lip service to Dorthar and to Zakoris. What had kept her secure was her lack of riches; she had nothing to offer an invader. Now, however, she acquired other values. The host of petty kings she supported here were too small and too parochial to oppose Yl.
He annexed the coastal region and the great forests adjacent, planning for the future: Timber, and oceanic access to the shores of Dorthar and those lands farther east and south. Zakoris had always been a country of ships. Naval war and piracy were her heritage; the latter had, even in peace, continued.
Between building their galleys and raiding in all directions for things they lacked and for slaves to man the oars, they lay with their women and their slave women and got sons. Every man of Free Zakoris was to fight. From ten years of age they were schooled to it. The daughters they produced had also a task, which was to bear more sons. There were no warrior women now, or women to serve the ships. They were precious vessels, now. In Zakorian tradition, homosexuality, which denied increase, was rewarded by a multitude of appalling punishments. In Free Zakoris currently, the crippled, unless they could prove some use, were slain, and unhealthy babies left in the jungle for wild beasts to cat. Barren women were flogged at the fire-altars of Zarduk, to appease him, until life left them with the blood. But before each major enterprise they would burn alive for him a perfect boy, to show they were in earnest.
The heart of Zakoris-In-Thaddra was a city of wood and stones and mud-brick, westward on the north coast. Ylmeshd had none of the stark grandeur of Hanassor. It stood above the jungle forest, on a sunset smeared with smokes. Beyond, a second forest of spars lay for miles across Ylmeshd’s three deep-water bays, the dying sun crucified on their points.
• • •
Caal retrieved the garments of a Dortharian prince from the baggage and Rarmon was requested to put them on, for their entry into Ylmeshd. This necessitated removal of the leg-irons, but escape was out of the question. Rarmon made no attempt at it. Dressed, the irons were fastened on again, the finishing sartorial touch.
Torches burned on the gate-arch which, like the wall, was of piled stones mortared by clay. Whole trees made the gate itself.
Save for its size, Ylmeshd was not like a city. Hovels leaned on hovels like cells in an ant-hill. Hordes of soldiers marched to and fro, in hardened leather—mail was scarce. Forges rang and glared at every intersection. There seemed to be no women out of doors, no children, though babies cried behind hide-curtained doorways.
Acting guide, Caal had called the attention of the two Karmians to a temple of Zarduk and another of Rom, the sea god. Both were no more than caves in the headland, closed by massive doors. The palace dominated on a rocky rise, darkness and sea behind it. It had a stone tower, and stone walls like the city. There was no break in this wall; a ladder was lowered for them to climb once the guards on the wall-top acknowledged their business.
The palace flew the banners of Old Zakoris, the Double Moon and Dragon. But before the entry there was a wooden pole and atop it a leopard of black metal, crudely shaped in the posture of springing: Symbol of the new regime. It rattled dryly in a wind from the sea.
Inside, the palace was dark and guttering from isolated torches. They entered the King’s hall. Wooden trunks, uncarved, held the wooden roof. The floor was dirt flung with skins.
At the far end was a dais with a great ebony chair they said Yl had had brought on his flight from Hanassor. Possibly, the statue had been brought, too. Rarmon had glimpsed a version of the fire god in Ommos, and this was substantially the same. The idol had no body, but was a formless log surmounted by a snarling convulsed face—a mask that could be interpreted as
rage, orgasm, or agony. The open belly leaped with red fire. Its energy, and a smell of roasting pelt, indicated some sacrifice had taken place not long ago.
They waited until Yl Am Zakoris came in behind the ebony throne, and down the steps.
For a Zakorian, he was light, bronze-skinned, but he had the threadlike lips and the twisted flattened nose, through the righthand nostril of which a golden chain passed to link a zircon in his right ear. He was a heavy man, ugly and aging, but not tired, and not strengthless. He grinned. It dazzled. His teeth were full of gems.
There was a shadowy group of men behind him. Even in the ill-light you could just see, one shadow was not quite like the rest.
Caal, now all Zakorian, was on his face. The two Karmians kneeled. Rarmon stood. No one had thought to push him down. When the guards who had come in with them took hold of him to do so, Yl called, “No, let him stay as he is. Let me look at him. Is this a king’s son? Ralnar, the scum of the Serpent Woman.” And Yl spat on the floor.
He came slowly to look. He was tall, but no taller than Rarmon. Raldnor, the scum of the Serpent Woman, had given his height, at least, to his sons.
“Do you know,” said Yl to Rarmon, “who sent you here?”
Rarmon said, “I was informed, Kesarh Am Karmiss.”
“Yes. The message I got informed me also, it was Kesr. A friendship token, before we crush Dorthar between us. And I was told you could supply Free Zakoris with the battle plans of your King. The one on the floor there,” Yl said confidentially, indicating the prostrate Caal, “will only have been allowed to learn so much. But you. You were privy to the Storm Lord’s councils, to his heart. If you’re his brother, as Kesr says to me in his letters you are.” Yl stood breathing in his face. Presently Yl said, “I suppose we’ll have to use our Zakorian arts on you, to make you render the strategies of Dorthar?”
“Not at all,” Rarmon said. “I’ll tell you anything. The Storm Lord will know quite well where I’ve gone or been taken, and will alter his military gambits accordingly. Anything from me will therefore be useless.”