by Tanith Lee
He inquired after the city.
She pointed, without words, southwest. So he went on.
• • •
The snow blizzard started in the middle of the day.
There was no shelter.
At first, he tried to ride through, but his beast was faltering. They would be beaten, and their sight put out. The zeeba might die, and he, too, might die. Dismounting, he tied cloth over the animal’s head, and bound his own eyes. Then he led the zeeba, a blind man, cautious and with a terrible essential leisure, through the frenzy of ice and wind.
After a while, there was no longer any pain. He could feel nothing. And then there was a slight pleasant warmth, which he knew from tales, told round safe home-fires, was the preface to freezing. When the zeeba sank down, he coaxed it, caressed it, tried to lift it up. It lay in his arms. If he stayed on it, the snow would cover him. And yet he could not seem to let go, its fading body heat, its flickering life, needful to him. Then the zeeba died very quietly, almost restfully, against him. Lur Raldnor laid it down, got up, and stumbled on, forgetting the pack and the saddle, eyes wrapped, not conscious of where he went.
Medaci would know if he perished. He could sense her, his mother, somewhere hidden and inaccessible, as if behind an enormous stony wall. He could not reach her or be reached, yet when the snow killed him, she would feel—what was it they said?—a silence like the ending of a low soft sound, a little area of dark, as if some constant, long-unnoticed light went suddenly out. Yannul would know it, too. Not coherently. It would come to him slowly, maybe taking months.
Would Rem know? There had never been a hint of mind speech between them. Rem, so guarded, even the brain and heart. . . .
Lur Raldnor had loved Rem-Rarmon—as he had loved his family, but the love was of a different kind. He had never been able to mistake it for the love a man might have for kindred. But neither was it the sexual love Rarmon would have recognized and tolerated. On the journey to Dorthar, Rarmon had gone away from him. In Anackyra itself, Yannul’s son had seen Rarmon cater to another man, who was perhaps only his true inner self. Curiously, Rarmon grew to resemble the Storm Lord then, so that it was possible to tell, despite all physical differences, that they were brothers. This was, too, like that thing Yannul had said of Raldnor Am Anackire—the mortal man leaving him, the embryo of a hero, or a god, beginning.
Yannul’s son saw something, inside his blindfolded eyes. A primeval forest, a sweep of a bay beyond, thick and motionless with ice, and the sea sealed with it. The black stems of the trees were also cased in ice, and the jungle foliage above had rotted, leaving skeletons gloved with snow. He knew the scene from the descriptions of others. The forests at the Edge of the World, the brink of the south. A landscape no longer suited to the climate of the Middle Lands, somehow enduring against all odds such extremes of cold. Even as he gazed inward at it, a red-eyed tirr darted over the whiteness, unmatched, poorly equipped to survive—surviving. A symbol.
The ground gave way. Lur Raldnor fell. He was in a drift of searing snow. Inner vision went out. He thrashed about but could not get loose. It became less awful to keep still.
He seemed to come back from somewhere a moment or an hour later to find someone was digging him out.
Lur Raldnor tried to greet his rescuers—there seemed more than one at work—but his mouth was numb and useless. He could just raise his hands and get the protective cloth away from his head.
The wind and the blizzard were done. Some travesty of daylight still lingered. So he could see with no difficulty the five wolves who were scrabbling to prise him from the snow.
He let his hand drop to the knife in his belt. He might be able to fight them off, although he seemed to have no bones, no coordination. He watched them, depressed more than afraid, waiting.
They were grayish, a couple nearly white. The low temperature blotted out their smell.
He came from the drift abruptly, almost as if propelled from below, and then two of them had him and he cried out, frantically wrenching at the knife. And a long narrow paw came down on his wrist. It was extraordinary, so like a human action that it stayed him. He stared into dark golden eyes that matched his own. The paw slid off him. The two wolves were pulling him over the snow and he let them. And then they went up a little hummock of ice and he saw the sixth wolf.
Lur Raldnor started to cry, and could not help it, though the tears burnt. Because the wolf was beautiful and it was part of the legend, and he knew it.
It was the size of a Shansarian horse, and so white it deadened the snow.
The five wolves were pressing against him, tugging, pushing. He found he could get up. He understood what he was meant to do, just as they seemed to understand he was weak and must be aided to do it. The great white wolf lay down and he crawled on to its back. And then, fluid with its strength, it rose up under him.
This was no illusion: The furnace of its body, the rough softness of the pelt, the peculiarly wholesome stink of its breath.
Then the wolf ran.
It ran for miles, and somewhere the sun set, and night came, so pallor went to shadow and shadow to blackness. Then there came a descent, a shallow valley. Weird shapes, trees spun with ice, something beyond, a barrier more solid than the sky. A wall, a broken chasm. The moon was rising and he wondered what it was for a moment. Then he remembered, and then he beheld a ruined mansion symbolized against it.
But there began to be lamplight. He had not associated that with the Lowland city, he had visualized it in the way of the stories, its fires concealed in fear.
And then he had been sloughed very gently and painlessly, and he was lying against a timbered door. The wolf, which he could still see in absolute detail, reared up against the door, touching the lintel with its brow. A paw struck the timbers and they resounded, once, twice. Bemused, Lur Raldnor lay under the arch of its body. Then the arch swung away. He turned his head on the snow and saw the white wolf pass between two buildings. It was gone.
The door opened. Even from their way of going on he knew they were Xarabians. They exclaimed over him, and then they exclaimed again and grew noiseless, for all around the white was pocked by the huge pads of the gigantic wolf.
As he began to lose consciousness, he noted they did not seem afraid or disbelieving, only full of awe and frightening, emotive exultation, as he had been.
• • •
They looked after him very well. Inside two days, he was sitting down in the round hall with them, aware of the romantic formula of his situation. They were a mirthful troupe, traders, gypsies once. There was even a honey-skinned daughter, who liked him. He had not had a girl since Yeiza. There had been no time, no inclination either, in the chase across half Vis which had ended up, all amazement and sorcery, here. No one had commented on the wolf-marks, however. It began to be reassuring to block that from one’s mind. For he guessed the prodigy had put an onus upon him. He was correct.
On the third day, someone knocked.
They had been playing a throw game in the firelight, and Raldnor was relaxed since he had now promised to cut wood for them tomorrow, the only payment he could so far render. Then into the room returned the uncle who had gone to open the door, looking constrained, and with him two of the Amanackire.
Everyone stood. Raldnor came to his feet also, not willingly, but so as not to bring trouble to his friends. He had never forgotten the market at Lin Abissa, the Lowland woman, and the throng making a road, making offerings, as if she were a goddess, nor a kind one. And in Dorthar, he had seen others, some as white as she had been, even to the eyes. Ice to look at and ice in the soul. They passed like cold air. There had been whispers of abnormal powers, not only telepathy, or that ruthless passive endurance with which the Plains People had become synonymous. Yeiza herself had once told him that some of the Amanackire were reckoned shape-changers, could heal unblemished from grave wounds, and ev
en fly. Lur Raldnor teased her into laughter at that. The most sophisticated Xarabians could be credulous. Yet, he had never effaced her telling of it, either.
The visitors did not approach. They waited for him—everyone knew it was for him—in the middle of the room. The Xarabs were gestured, mildly enough, back to their fireside. And went.
Lur Raldnor walked over to the Lowlanders. They were both men, and though blanched, their eyes were not white. They looked at him, without menace it must be admitted. But then, without anything.
“If you’re trying to speak within to me,” he said, “I can’t.”
“But you have done so,” one said.
“With my mother,” he said. It was a personal thing, he did not like to tell them. At the same time they stung him, for he had their blood and wanted to prove so.
“Yes, Medaci. You are Medaci’s son.”
“And, as my hosts will also have informed you, the son of Yannul,” Lur Raldnor said fiercely.
“Are you fit, now?” the other man asked.
“Where is it,” Raldnor said, “you want me to go with you?”
Then he stepped away from them, catching his breath with a silly little sound. For they had shown him. It was there only a moment, the picture of the terrace, a palace with snapped-off pillars, and through the gaps as well as open space.
He mastered himself, and said, “Why?”
No mind-picture, no intrusion, now.
One of them said, “You wished to fight, once.”
“What? You mean you’re organizing an army again, to take on Free Zakoris? Or is it against Kesarh?”
“No army,” the man said.
“A fight nonetheless.” The other smiled. For the first, Raldnor acknowledged they were neither of them much his senior. As he got used to them after the dark Xarabians, they looked less like ice, more the shades of light he had seen so often in his mother, and his younger brother. He himself was winter-pale, wind-burned, no more. And he had learned early on how he could use the color of his eyes.
He shrugged, to gauge them.
“We,” said the paler man, “are not your enemies.”
“Some of our people have chosen remoteness. We remain. The world is our mother, as Anackire is the world’s soul, to us. To see the world at war again, the scars opened on themselves, new scars made, the sweep of Zakorian hate which is insanity, the hunger of Karmiss which is cruel. These are the enemies. Not men, never men, but the evil dreams of men.”
Lur Raldnor began to feel a desolate fatigue. He remembered what he had thought in Elyr, the hopeless resignation worse than fear or rage. The world tumbling into chaos, and no one to prevent it.
“Oh yes,” the paler of the two Lowlanders said, tackling the thought Raldnor had not spoken. “Even in that, there’s more than one path to extinction. But other paths, also. Ashni passed by our village. We came here. Very many came here.”
“Like the other time,” the second man said. Now he grinned. “Raldnor’s time. But she’s the daughter of Raldnor.”
“Ashne’e?” Lur Raldnor questioned.
But they said the name over, and he heard the slight difference.
“Ashni.”
The paler man said, “Come and see.”
“This woman you say—”
“Ah, no. She’s gone already, into the north. Each of the cisterns of the world’s power must be woken and tapped. Hers is Koramvis.”
Then, at last he saw how they looked at him, and he went cold.
“You’ve been told about the great wolf.”
“Yes.”
“You expected me to come here, as you did. Why?”
But he knew.
Even the Xarabians did not seem surprised when, solemnly and irrevocably, the Amanackire each touched forehead and heart, the arcane reverence the Shadowless Plains now gave to a lord or a priest, those upon whose fate they saw the Choice of Anackire.
Although in fact it was never given to those who, like Raldnor, Ashne’e, Ashni, were in essence themselves considered to be aspects of the goddess herself. Since the goddess asked nothing, needing nothing, being everything.
They went out into the street, and crowds were standing there with torches. There was no element of the macabre or the portentous. It felt almost frivolous, like a party going to a wedding or a feast.
The Xarabians followed them out.
They walked, hundreds of people, through the snow towards the ruined palace and the magic well.
• • •
Later, almost into dawn, lying alone on the border of sleep, he thought: Can it be so simple—ingenuous?
And somewhere, maybe from some other drifting mind in the dark city, or from some cave within himself, the affirmative.
Men are drops of water in the ocean of life. And yet the vast ocean is only that, myriad drops of water. One single thought, crying out: This shall be! Or crying out: This shall not be! And the vast ocean is altered.
They had said something like this to him, not in words. He tried from habit to put it into words now, although the words would lessen it, make it unclear.
The palace had been warmed by the torches. What occurred? They had stood on the ancient mosaics, and drunk yellow wine which they said came from a well. . . .
There were Xarabians, Elyrians, Dortharians even, and mixes of all types. And the Amanackire, spread through the crowd, like a silver string holding everything together.
Lur Raldnor had always had the telepathy of the Plains. Now those who had elected themselves, or been elected to educate him, began to do so. It was not hard to learn, after all. But then, it was not really learning, only recapturing.
Was he important to them because of these obvious things, Lowland blood which brought the mind speech, Yannul’s blood which was proximity to what had gone before? Even, maybe, the significant name of Raldnor, which now was his, and had always been his, though one of Raldnor’s sons had attempted to strip him of it.
Sleep moved over him.
He would not be having the girl now. Sex, the magic power, would be retained and channeled. Strangely, already he did not want her in that way. He could think back to Yeiza, or to others, and there would come merely a glimmer of the senses, cerebral, no longer governing the flesh.
Of course, the cold and loneliness of the journey, the hardship, the being lost, the closeness to death, these had enabled him to enter the occult aura of the ruin. The magician’s purgation before sorcery.
Floating now, as if in the sky. Murmurs of awareness all about him that were not sound, and glows like candles that were not seen.
He remembered how Ashni had gone by them. It seemed to him that, laboring in Xarabiss, desperate to get to Lan, he had caught rumors of something bizarre, and paid no heed—Men and women moving through the last coppery summer days and over the starry hills, something about music and song that were not audible, and sheens and rainbows invisible, and wildcats, wolves, serpents dancing, and flowers in long yellow hair that did not wither. And yet perhaps there had only been a group of travelers walking in the dust, riding carts past the villages through the still ear of night. Which was the vision, the mirage, which the truth? Were both the same? Or could it be that something which had not happened at all had yet happened, because the mind perceived it where the eyes would not?
He thought of a primeval forest in the snow, persisting where it could not persist, centuries.
He was asleep, now, and sleeping, he looked about him without eyes, to find Medaci.
Presently he did find her.
She was as utterly before him as if they had met in sunlight in a little room. But such things were equivalents, as spoken words were the equivalents of the speech of the mind.
In a response then, which was the equivalent of a quiet touch upon her shoulder, he asked her attention, and received it. S
he was not nonplussed. She seemed unastonished to behold him, safe and where he was, and meshed in the Dream of Anackire. But her gladness in him was as he recollected.
He took her hand and they stood together in the sunlit room smiling at each other, in the love that could only be when no door, however thin or partly ajar, intervened.
He might never see her again. He knew it, and so did she. The fires that would be awakened, a million times greater than any which had gone before—that Waking of the Serpent, to this a taper to the sun—such fires might overwhelm them. Ankabek had been the first sacrifice. Undemanded, unintended, yet now a facet. To die for this would not be required, yet it might come to be that one would die.
For, as he had believed in the beginning, it was to be a victory through passion. Except it was a different passion than the one he had taught himself to serve, with a sword and an angry heart.
As sleep settled more deeply, he relinquished Medaci’s hand, and she was softly gone.
He was on a golden barge then, winged by a solitary shining sail. It was his life, and he powered it by his will and sent it flying over the bright water toward morning.
• • •
Yannul the Lan, leaning on one elbow, saw his wife smile in her sleep. Sleeping, she looked so young, younger even than when he had met her. Then she spoke his name and her eyes opened.
“What is it?” he said.
“I dreamed of Lur Raldnor.”
“Was it a kind dream?” Superstition and a desire for her peace mingled in his words.
“Yes. Before—there was a shadow. I was afraid. But he was with me, he told me. Not only a dream, Yannul. Mind speech. We can be easy about him, now.”
“Good,” he said. Almost absently. He found that accepting an unvaried diet of supernatural things tired him. It had been the same with Raldnor of Sar, except that the tiredness had expressed itself in other ways, the ways of a young man.