by Tanith Lee
“No,” said Basjar, “they live, all three of them. Yannul thought it wise to travel. From the way the Karmian riff-raff left your farm, you’ll agree he may have been right. I sold much of the livestock before they could get their bloody paws on it. All the money, and most of the valuables are secure, bonded in Xarabiss where Kesarh’s tribe can’t reach. Your father’s only lost the land.”
“He loved the land.”
Dasjar shrugged woefully, a very Xarabian gesture.
Lur Raldnor had been awhile trying to get home. He had let the servant remain in Dorthar. The man had no family, and did not fancy Lan’s current dangers. It should have made the journey lighter, but did not. In Ommos, shipping seemed a myth. Giving up on it, Raldnor had ridden after all for the Xarabian border. Near here, he met seven men, who robbed him. Reaching the first port penniless, he must lose further days hiring out as a laborer to get cash to pay his passage. Finally, when he would have killed to get it, someone had mercy and let him work his way on a shallow skimmer which was risking Lan to set up prostitutes for the soldiers. The seas were rough. The girls lay retching along the rail, wishing to die. Lur Raldnor rowed, or bailed, seasick too and numb with cold, wishing the ocean would die instead.
When he got to land, and so to the farm, he had wandered for too long amid the nightmare. The walls still stood. But they had fired the roof, urinated into corners, killed orynx in the yard. The snow hid nothing. Every exquisite memory of childhood, which the villa-farm had held in crystal, lay about mangled. And he had deduced his mother, father and brother were murdered. He almost never thought to search under the stone.
Basjar sat by quietly for the moments Raldnor needed, silently and with complete dignity, to weep. Then wiping his eyes on his sleeve like a boy, he said, “Where are they?”
“They went with a Vardish caravan, to be sure. Yannul’s goal was the Lowlands. Hamos, most likely. I sent my letters there for him.”
“She wouldn’t have wanted the Plains,” Lur Raldnor said. “Damn Karmiss.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
They drank to it.
Next morning, funded by Yannul’s agent, and with certain helpful papers and seals, Basjar had been able to supply, Lur Raldnor bolted out of Amlan, pressing south through the snow as Yannul had once done. And thus, bypassing Lanelyr, Olm and the Zor, rode on toward Elyr and the Shadowless Plains.
• • •
His namesake, Karmian Raldnor, Guardian of Lan, had himself no plans for travel that season. There were, at the onset of the siege snow, three thousand, five hundred Karmian troops split between the port and the city of Amlan, and, though he could not work sorcery on them by glance or voice, as could Kesarh, they liked him. He let them do almost as they wished, and gave them “bounty” for it. This bounty came from extortion elsewhere, but this did not upset the mixes and Vis who served under him. Commanders in other reaches of Lan and Elyr also had a glowing opinion of Raldnor Am Ioli. He could flatter, and he would pay. They committed crimes, and he forgave them. He caught them out in swindles, and understood. There was also the matter of Karmian rations. It seemed Kesarh had not cared to let his warriors have quite enough, prepared for them to go without in Lan. Raldnor, who had diverted or withheld supplies, now distributed them as his own gift. He saw that women and liquor were brought in. And while preserving a modicum of policy in Amlan, near riot was now and then allowed elsewhere.
Eventually, discipline would have to be reinforced, but he would be able to blame Kesarh for that.
Someone knocked loudly.
Raldnor, lolling on a couch, snapped his fingers. A Lannic page ran to open the door.
Brushing through door-curtain and page, one of Raldnor’s Karmians appeared. He had been at the port garrison yesterday. Now he was here, boots and cloak thick with snow.
“There’s an Istrian ship lying off beyond the ice. Guardian. Boat rowed in. This packet for you, sir.”
Raldnor, with inevitable foreboding, broke Kesarh’s seal.
The contents were slight but Raldnor was a great while over them. When he looked up, he was yellow.
“Something wrong, Guardian?”
He had let them get impertinent, too.
“I’m to go back to Istris.” Patently, the letter had implied rather more, none of it reassuring. The sergeant winced. He, a parasite of Raldnor’s monopolies, did not like the drift of this either. “The new command must be on that ship.”
“Didn’t see anything of it, sir.”
“No, perhaps not. But they’ll be halfway down the infernal road behind you by now.”
There was a commiserating, awkward pause.
“The lads’ll be sorry to see you go, sir.”
Raldnor, who had started to weigh, gave up, and flung his life in the balance.
“Damn it. I’m going nowhere.”
• • •
When he was seven years old, Emel had been wakened in the night, dressed and whispered over, and borne to the map-chamber at Istris. The Warden had given him sweets, and let him fall asleep again. But when Kesarh kneeled to him, Emel stood up very properly. Afterwards his nurses murmured how good he had been.
Now, in the dark, lights burst into the bedroom, he was wakened, and Raldnor his protector loomed alone against the door. Emel must get up and get dressed and come somewhere and do certain proper public things, as before, long ago. But Raldnor had none of the women’s gentleness, and though strict instructions had been rendered previously, the bindings hurt, and the male clothing felt insidiously false. Emel was frightened tonight in Amlan as he had never been frightened in Istris. Though, as he now knew, he had had every cause to be.
He was nine when, in another sort of sleep, the Ommos knives had cut him. Afterwards he was cosseted. Drugs had spared him much pain; he had not learned to have any positive sexual desires, and did not mourn heterosexual loss. He had had six years since to grow used to what he was, and now it seemed ordinary. Only at Zastis had there ever been, sometimes, a slight bother. Emel-who-was-Mella did not know that his lovers died, every one of them, when they left him, only that he was never allowed to see them again.
It was Raldnor who taught him, by inference, to resent his new body, which was hermaphrodite, impotently weaponed, and flowered with small virginal breasts. Raldnor had, particularly since Lan, impressed on his charge that, if he should ever have his rights—his kingdom—Emel would have to act the man again, in disguise. The breasts must be bound. There were medicines which, if taken regularly, would lessen such tokens, and raise a little down on the beardless face. And this was how he must walk and stand, sit and speak and be. The instruction had been endlessly repeated, always with tacit cruelty. Emel had come to know his inadequacy by example. He writhed at the girl-name of “Mella.” He hated Raldnor, and he hated Kesarh, Kesarh the more, for he had loved him once. But everything, the lessons, the hatreds, the potions and bandagings and disguise, were all far off. Bored to tears, Emel only wanted to be home in Ioli. He did not really want to be a man and a king.
And now apparently, long before it was reckoned on, he must.
He threw an hysterical tantrum promptly. But then Raldnor struck him, thrice, and Emel knew there was no recourse.
Sniveling, he did everything he was told, and did it well.
But Raldnor did not say he had been good.
• • •
The houses along the Palace Square which had become the city’s Karmian barracks had also been aroused. Men packed into the courtyards at the rear and filled the plot of open land that went up behind, climbing trees, walls, the roofs of makeshift stables. Assembly was a Shansarian custom. In the great halls of Istris it was feasible, but here the enormous quantity of soldiers was crammed too tight for comfort. The cold gnawed and the torches flared. The air crackled with oaths and sparks, smell and urgency. In five minutes the situation was charged; s
omething would have to happen.
Presently the lord Guardian entered the courts, guarded, and with some servant by him done up in a cloak. One or two who got a closer look were titillated to see the face of the big-footed mistress-girl from Ioli.
Raldnor was not Kesarh, and did not try to be. He knew the tension the overcrowding and the hour would create. He knew also he had turned his troops into a rabble, and that a rabble could be manipulated.
They applauded him, too, clapping, calling, banging their fists on their shields and their spears on the stone flags. They liked him. He had flattered them. He had given them drink and trollops and cash, let them run amok and told them they were fine, the backbone of their country. He spoke and they listened. He had always said things they liked to hear.
Raldnor Am Ioli announced first that Kesarh, who could not even see that enough food was sent them, now recalled their commander to Istris. They did not approve, and displayed their disapproval, noisily. Raldnor, having thanked them, secondly announced why he dared not go back. Kesarh had, obviously, fathomed Raldnor’s secret. It had had to come. He had balanced his life on a line for nearly seven years. For the sake of justice.
He had seen to it wine was going round, to ‘keep off the cold.’ Now they waited all agog, like babies, for the story.
Raldnor related it, if not with charisma, at least with some flair. He gave them the regency and the plague, and the plot against the Prince—King Emel. He gave them his own revolt, unable to slaughter a child. He explained his rescue. He even awarded them, had to under these circumstances, the fact of Emel’s being kept by him, clad as female. But he left out, of course, that such a ruse would soon have been a failure but for some extra means. He omitted the Ommos knives.
That Emel symbolized the old Shansarian rule was a drawback, and had always been. But Raldnor was himself a mix, and here in Lan the troops’ love affair with Kesarh had soured even for the Vis. In the end, the superstitious currency of pale hair and skin and eyes might tip the scales.
Raldnor was still, whatever else had altered, that opportunist who had pounded out to muddy Xai and flung his dice on Kesarh’s table. Still an audaciously clever and perceptive man whose cleverness and perception would sometimes cause him to act foolishly and blindly.
“Gentlemen,” he said now to the disorderly vandals squashed in the space before him, “I’m in your hands. And your true King is in your hands. We are dependent on you, on your awareness of what’s right, your love of country, your loyalty, and your mercy.” And then, turning to the muffled being at his side he said, so they all heard, “Don’t be afraid, my lord. These men are noble. They won’t harm you.”
The cloak came off on cue. Emel had stayed tractable. He knew better than to make another scene. He stood, very young, face washed, hair lopped, in good male raiment. His fixed terror resembled pride. He did not, in the wine-smoke and the torch fumes, look like Mella anymore. There was a look of his royal father, instead. They even forgot the reedy voice, since Raldnor did not let them hear it.
“Emel son of Suthamun,” Raldnor said to them. And then he knelt, in the Vis-Karmian way, at Emel’s feet.
There was a long, long noiselessness, during which Raldnor held his breath. Then one by one, group by group, battalion by battalion, almost two thousand men began to applaud.
• • •
Kesarh’s replacement Guardian, riding into night-black Amlan with thirty men, found nothing amiss on the streets. The garrison seemed wide-awake, and far better regulated than the sloppy mess at the port. He was politely saluted and conducted inside the palace. In the corridor leading to Am Ioli’s apartments, doors flung wide and an attack occurred. The men of Lan’s new Protector tried valiantly to fight, but were hampered by the narrow aisle, sea-and-snow-fatigue and shock. Raldnor had not been supposed to panic. Even if he had, no one had foreseen the whole inland garrison going over to him. How had he managed it? If they wondered, they died wondering.
At length Kesarh’s replacement Guardian was peeled alive off the wall, disarmed and deposited in a room.
There was a dispatch. It purported to be his own, and it informed Kesarh of the success of his replacement’s mission. Raldnor invited him to sign it. .
“How long do you think you can keep this quiet?”
“Until the thaw. Long enough.”
“If I sign this, I’m dead.”
“So you are. And dead if you refuse. The difference being only in the manner.”
Kesarh’s replacement Guardian signed. His body was come across two nights later, stripped to the skin and lifeless, somewhere in the hills.
Meanwhile, the Karmian ship pulled away from Lan’s icy shore for her long, weather-slow voyage of return. She was laden with one dispatch, lightened only of passengers.
There followed a series of wildnesses in Amlan. Celebrating soldiers, as the east had found, tended to commit arson, rape and burglary, and to cast spears at anything which ran.
Raldnor let the festivity continue. He was busy preparing his approaches, so the rest of Karmiss-In-Lan should come over to him.
Ten days after his sparkling coup, while striding across the royal gardens, he was suddenly set on by a yelling Lan with a knife. The man fled before the undisciplined soldiery could catch him. His entry and getaway seemed professionally managed, if the assault itself was rather desperate. Actually, he had intended to kill Raldnor, as Kesarh had suggested, riding disgraced to the ship along the port road. But Raldnor had not obliged in this. The assassin had had to be inventive. Either way, it looked like the work of an incensed patriot, which was what Kesarh had wanted.
Raldnor Am Ioli lay in the snow, eyeing the soldiers who came to pick him up. At first they thought he would speak to them again. But his eyes set. He had said forever all he was going to.
They bore him in with the dramatic dignity the undignified demand at such times. Uproar in their wake, they went on to break the tidings to King Emel.
19.
ON THE LANELYRIAN BORDER OF ELYR, something strange had happened.
He had sheltered in a deserted steading through the night. The weather-shy Karmian patrols were few and far between, but he had spotted a big, dull star up in the hills that might be a burning village, and taken no chances, setting off again before the sun rose.
Near dawn, then, Lur Raldnor saw two wolves, their smoking jaws clamped in some edible death. They stared with red eyes and red drooling mouths, but as their spit steamed in the snow he realized, with a sudden shift of perspective, that it was not a carcass they were devouring but a crimson flame which ran along the ground. Then as he watched, too amazed yet to doubt, they vanished and the fire with them.
Days and nights of snow could confuse the eyes. Mirages were not uncommon. But the image stayed with Yannul’s son, those petals of flame spilling from the jaws of wolves, not harming them, and not harmed.
• • •
Some reports stated Kesarh had put just short of eight thousand men into the east. Others said it was nearer ten. In the little stretch of Elyr there was scant evidence of them. And yet villages lay empty, doors swinging, a broken pot lying to catch fresh snow, everything human melted away to the secret places, the hollow hills, the ancient towers. Once he heard the whirr of a wheel, a spinning-loom such as was used here and on the Plains. But it was the wind moved it. If he came on edible food he ate some, not all, and left payment under their hearth stones, in case they should ever come back. Each time, he felt a dread. The world was tumbling toward darkness and chaos. Who could ever stop it? Who could ever come back?
Only last summer he had dreamed of standing in the way of the shadow, driving it off. Victory, through passion. It was Rem—Rarmon—who somehow, distanced, no longer by him, had shown him the futility of the dream. The sword could only beget the sword. And yet, to lay down the sword was only death by other means.
Prosaically
, it disgusted him, too, that having got in such a fix to secure a ship from Xarabiss to Lan, here he was racing almost full circle to the northern Plains, Hamos, and maybe on to the border of Xarabiss again.
The cold and the whiteness and the silence began to break his heart. He was soul-sick. He sat the wretched exhausted zeeba under the dark silver sky of noon, looking off into pallor and nothingness.
He had begun to speak aloud to the zeeba by then, and now he said to it: “I shan’t find them.”
And he went on sitting there in the emptiness a great while, the blade of the wind in his face, but not moving, saying over and over, “I shan’t find them.”
• • •
In the area now where he should have made a definite turn to the west and north, he saw he had no faith in this direction. Hamos lay that way, and another Lowland town whose name he had forgotten. He knew, unreasonably, his family was not there.
He discovered he wished to go southwest. This was also unreasonable. There was hardly anything to the south. Except, of course, the old Lowland city. And they would never have gone there. Medaci could never have borne it. And yet.
Yannul had gone by this route, returning from Lan in the Lowland War, riding through the drifts and the cold, with the answer his country would neither hinder nor help.
Lur Raldnor turned south.
It was a kind of drawing. Difficult to do anything else.
But the city was another mirage. Sometimes he saw it, transparent blackness between the winds and the white earth.
Signs of habitation were less frequent than the phantoms of snow-sight. Once he passed a hovel with an old woman standing in the door. He asked her for food, if she could spare any. She gave him a folded lump of bread with meat in it. When he tried to pay her, she shook her head. She never spoke. A pure Lowlander, he wondered if she had only ever used the mind speech. He had had this with his mother, as a child; in adolescence—that age of the clandestine—the open door had partly closed between them. Just sometimes some bright joy or flash of hurt would break through the door. To the stranger, he could not speak within.