by Tanith Lee
Sometimes there was water, and he drank, and the beast sluiced up the water and bathed both of them.
He felt its sadness. He pitied it. But he did not know he felt pity.
Days and nights.
It seemed he had lived for hundreds of years.
The madman dreamed he was on a river. Someone cut him with a knife, a shallow cut, and the cut healed. But then he was cut again. And then on the sixth day—in the dream—there was a challenge.
He had no password; he simply stood looking at the three men, seeing them with more than his eyes. They breathed out oaths at the color of his hair, which—in the dream—was nearly white. They told him they would take him where he wished to be.
When he woke up, the madman laughed.
The palutorvus grazed the leaves.
They had come over five hundred wandering miles and did not, either of them, know it.
And they went on.
• • •
Rarnammon, hero and king, had built a city in Thaddra once, but it lay in ruins.
The jungles clung close to the valley where the city rested, and had entered its streets. It was a white city but the jungle blackened it. Its name was lost. In forgotten antique tales, Rarnammon, whose own name had, in the beginning, been only Rarn, called it for his birthplace. Which was, depending on the version, Mon or Emon, or Memon.
It had, for centuries now, been the lair of thieves and outlaws.
• • •
Tuab Ey, sprawling like a cat to soak up the sun on the high roof, shaded his eyes and began to credit what he had taken for an illusion.
A piece of the jungle-forest was indeed progressing along the wide pale thoroughfare thirty broken walls away down the slope. But it was not, after all, a fantastically moving plant. It was a shadow-beast.
“Look, Galud. What is that?”
Galud, unhandsome, as Tuab Ey was not, scowled from under their awning of sacks. Galud was sun-shy, for he had Tarabine blood, but he had also the long clear sight of his unknown sailor father.
“By my half-wit gods, a palutorvus.”
“I thought,” said Tuab Ey, “such beasts were all extinct.”
“Farther south, the swamps’re full of the things. The Free Zakorians use them for dray-animals.” Galud and another man spat, as even Thaddrian cutthroats would do at mention of Zakoris-In-Thaddra.
“It looks big,” said Tuab Ey nonchalantly. “It looks as if it’s coming here. Shall we run away?”
His men laughed at the ritual idea of their young leader in retreat. He was junior to most of them, but fierce as a kalinx. Pretty as one, too. Tall and slim, he had a lot of Dortharian mixed in his genes. His bandit garments were tattered, revealing a compactly muscled cinnamon skin that had collected only a handful of thin and seemly scars. The raging noon sun on his hair found copper—there might be a Lowland strain somewhere, though his eyes were black as the trees beyond Rarnammon’s ruined city. The earring in his ear was new. It had been carved from the tooth of a man, a Thaddric freak nearly half again his own height, that he killed in a fray in a town to the north. The freak had been friends with a petty king of the region. Tuab Ey and his men had prudently departed.
Galud said, “There’s a fellow up on that monster’s back.”
“I thought so,” said Tuab Ey.
The palutorvus, ambling through a crumbling arch, knocked down most of the wall on either side. It came into a garden, once the pleasance of princes, and began to eat the vines. The man partly lying on its back seemed unconcerned. He did not glance their way. He could not be of their kind. Each renegade holed up in nameless Memon established his territory. Only two days ago, they had fought a rival pack of robbers to keep this tottering palace. The dead bodies, all the interlopers’, had been flung down a handy dry well, over there in the garden where the palutorvus was feeding.
Tuab Ey was leaving the roof.
Galud, and the other lieutenant, the One-Eared, fell into precautionary step behind him.
“Your animal is grazing my pasture,” said Tuab Ey, looking up the long hill of the palutorvus, to the man on top. “I trust you’re going to pay me.”
“Tuab,” said Galud softly. “Can’t you see? He’s crazy.” Tuab Ey had begun to consider it. Thaddrians tended to be superstitious of madness—the Smitten of Gods was what they called the insane. But the Dortharian sophistication of his father made him only scornful. Scornfully, then, even as Galud and the One-Eared affected religious signs, Tuab Ey shouted up the length of the beast: “Are you getting off, or do I throw a stone to knock you off?”
Then the man turned and looked down at him.
The madman’s hair, which was black and curling, reached his shoulders, and he was thickly bearded. The sun had been searing the rest of him very dark, but he was not one of Yl’s nation. Unless Free Zakorians ever had gold eyes. Even here, there had come to be a wary respect for the yellow races. Their goddess could rise on mountain summits to terrify Her foes. With luck, a lot of luck, She might destroy the Black Leopard of the Zakorian-Accursed.
“Well,” said Tuab Ey. “I’m waiting.”
But his tone was more dulcet. The madman’s Lowlander eyes disconcerted him. A thing he was not used to.
Then the madman altered his position. The palutorvus, taking this as a desire to dismount, which perhaps it was not, kneeled impressively. The madman, taking the kneeling in turn as an enablement to dismount, did so.
The watchers were struck by his limber strength. He had the grace of the professional fighter, and they recognized it at once.
Standing before them, he was taller than Tuab Ey, therefore taller than the others. Even covered in human dirt and the debris of the forests, he was imposing, well-made, coordinated. The loin-guard was familiar to the One-Eared, who had inadvertently served a month with Free Zakorian slave gangs. The thief muttered this knowledge to his leader. But his leader seemed not to hear, only staring at the madman. Finally, Tuab Ey said, “Give me that wine.”
The One-Eared unhooked the flask from his belt. Tuab Ey, not taking his gaze off the madman, received the flask, uncorked it, held it out to him. The madman was a while accepting. Then he drank sparingly and handed back the flask.
Although he did not speak, he no longer looked mad, merely unusual.
“Come, then,” Tuab Ey said. His father had actually been an aristocrat absconded after some nefarious act in Dorthar. Tuab Ey now and then reverted to odd displays of breeding. “Be our guest. Follow us. Your—er, your transport will be safe enough here. I doubt if any of our neighbors will try to steal it. The meat, they tell me is awful.”
He walked off, and his lieutenants went after him. Sure enough, the madman followed.
• • •
In the great hall of Tuab Ey’s appropriated palace, sunset, then dusk, recolored the wall paintings. The ancient hearths were unusable. A fire leapt brightly on the smashed mosaic, its smoke going out adequately through the smashed roof. When it rained, the fire tended to perish.
The nights grew almost chilly in winter. Sometimes snakes or lizards stole up to share their fire. Tuab Ey did not let his men harm them; they amused him. Once a tribe of apes had got in. Tuab Ey, imitating the chief ape’s threat-behavior exactly, grunting and jumping up and down, had frightened them off.
Now Tuab Ey sat cross-legged, watching the madman, who sat himself a little apart from them and from the fire. He had been offered food, fruit and vine-shoots, and meat from yesterday’s hunt. He had eaten little, and none of the meat. He had been shown the cracked cistern in the courtyard, freshly full of rain. The bandits washed in it when they had the mind; Tuab Ey, the aristocrat’s son, bathed there every day. The madman got into the cistern and cleansed himself. One of the robbers they had slaughtered two days before had been tall and athletic. His clothes were offered the madman, who donned them, ignoring, or
uncaring at the knife rent over the heart.
Now, dressed as a bandit, by a bandits’ fire, the madman who, perhaps, should have been at home with such things, regarded the air, seeing sights invisible.
Tuab Ey rose, walked to the madman, and sat down again.
“I’ve a razor and fat, if you want to shave.”
The madman did not respond.
Tuab Ey went on watching him.
One of his men said, “Tuab’s in love with the Smitten of Gods.”
Tuab Ey said, “Each to his own. Is it the frieze of naked girls in the fifth court, or the seventh, that you lie under and play with yourself?”
They laughed. They started to talk about women they had had, or boys.
When the madman got to his feet and walked out, they looked, but that was all. Only Tuab Ey, smiling at them like the proffered razor, went after him.
And like a kalinx, only Tuab Ey pursued his guest up and down the palace, over the ruined stairs, across the subsiding terraces. When the madman paused, so did Tuab Ey. And when he continued, Tuab Ey continued.
• • •
Rarnammon, said the stones of nameless Memon.
Rem, Ram, Rarmon, Rarnammon, said the heights and depths of the city at every window-place and balcony.
The wind soughed through the forest and through the vents of towers.
Rarnammon, said the wind.
In each chamber, the wall paintings came alive. He saw the orgiastic feastings, the women in their gauzes, the men with the leathers and draperies of another time, the chalices wide enough to swim in, brimmed by wine. He heard the moaning of unremembered instruments, and the love-cries of those who coupled on the cushions—sounds which never change. He beheld sacrifice to a dragon-headed god which grasped lightnings in its hands. He was witness to an army, marching like armored smoke through the boulevards of the city, war music clashing and the sunlight of ghost-day rebounding from spears and chariots. Rarnammon had taken the continent of Vis and made it one, every land of Vis bound in fealty to himself. He was the first to bear the title ‘Storm Lord’. Yet his eyes were Lowlander’s eyes.
The madman was Rarnammon. A golden-eyed Vis.
Tribute was brought to him, endless streams of men on their knees or faces, heaps of jewels, bars of metal, weapons, slaves—He felt the heat of noon on his skin in the chill of night, and the female kiss of silk against him, where the rough cloth lay.
“Storm Lord,” they said.
But he walked through a colonnade, and saw in at a window. A woman was rocking a child in a cradle, passionlessly, for something to do. And the child stared at her with an aloof distrust to match her own. It was Lyki. She was young, and the child was himself. And then he saw her again, in some other surrounding—a tent it seemed to be, and she clutched the child he was to her, hating him and in need. And someone had said: “If I were to say to you, Lyki, that I would spare your life on one condition, that condition being that I take your child and rip it open with this sword, you would let me do it, for this is how you are made.” And now that someone who spoke, who was Raldnor his father, said to her, “Your death would be useless. Therefore, you shall not die.”
And then it was raining, and he passed through the gate of the red house on Slope Street, in Karmiss.
It was not difficult to traverse the house, and reach the tiny anteroom and so the bedroom. The merchant was not there, out or away. Lyki lay in the bed. She was colorless, her darkness, even her dark hair, seemed drained to monochrome. She pleated the coverings with her fingers, her mouth turned in and down as he had always recollected it. For a moment she seemed flaccid, something cast adrift on the shores of life, soon to be reclaimed by the hunger of the sea. But then she caught sight of him, and she revived.
“So,” she said. “So. You steeled yourself, you put off all the more important things, and came after all. Well. I never thought you would. Money, yes. I thought your guilt and shame might drive you to that. But to waste your precious person on me. Well. I am amazed.”
He stood before her, knowing her. Still.
“Well,” she said. She grimaced, feverish with her excitement and her spite. “An honor. The Prince Kesarh Am Xai’s own henchman, and here in my bedchamber. Did you bring any more ankars? The physician’s no good. He prescribes this and that, but it doesn’t help me. He”—she meant the merchant, her protector—“has gone off to a tavern. He swears I make his own illness worse with mine. Well,” she said, “men have always treated me badly. And you, my son, you never loved me. Never.”
He moved forward, coming up beside the bed, and looked down at her. She was near to death, he had seen this expression on other faces, a concentration beyond her will on some inner perspective, which was death itself.
“You look older,” she said. She seemed suddenly afraid. “What has he done to you? How can you look older? At Zastis you were here, whipped, disgraced—for more than a year I see nothing of you and then you crawl to me, vomit on my floor, put me to difficulty and expense—”
“Mother,” he said. He spoke quietly, but it stopped her. Perhaps she had never heard this in his voice before. He himself did not quite comprehend it. Compassion, forbearance, but not pity and not hate.
And then she began to weep. The tears gushed from her eyes, and he wondered that she had the strength left to cry.
“I beat you,” she said. “You were wicked and deserved it, but I beat you. I should not have beaten you. I shouldn’t have hurt you so.”
“The Amanackire say. What we have done is the past; reiterate the deed, or dismiss the deed.”
“No. I beat you. I hurt you. I’ll be punished.”
“You were punished,” he said. “Do you remember him, Raldnor son of Rehdon, Elect of the goddess? Do you remember in that tent under Koramvis the night before the last battle? He told you what no mortal thing should ever have to hear, he told you he saw the evil in you, as if you were the only creature in the world that had evil in it. And because he made you know your littleness and your viciousness and your selfishness—which is in every one of us, mother, and in him, in Raldnor, too, when he was a man—because he made you know all that, where most of us can keep ourselves from knowing and so hope for something better, you hoped for nothing of yourself, and became simply what he had told you that you were.”
She stared through her tears. Her mouth was open, as if she would gasp in what he said to her.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “anything you did to me. You gave me my life. What I do with my life is my concern, not yours, nor can you be blamed for it. But I thank you for the giving.”
“Rem,” she said, “I’m dying.”
“Wherever you go,” he said, “you’ll be free of this.”
“Are you dead?” she whispered. “Rem—have you come to lead me?”
He knew from the name she called him, and the name she had had for Kesarh, from the room, from the sensation of the atmosphere and season, that he had retrogressed, eight or nine years. She had died in Karmiss long ago and he had not heard of it. As he had ridden on Kesarh’s business to Ankabek, Lyki had finished her battle with the earth. And probably he only imagined this. It was not possible to go back. She had ended alone.
But he said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. The other side of life is only life.”
She frowned, taking the words into herself. She was still puzzling when the final breath went from her. And then her face smoothed over, as if she knew it all. He closed her eyes. Her lips remained a little parted, but no longer wizened or turned down.
He stepped away, and saw Doriyos standing in a colonnade, holding out to him a cup of wine.
But when he took the cup it was Yannul’s son, Lur Raldnor, who had offered it. Then the cup touched his lip. He tasted not wine, but water.
“You will bring yourself to yourself again,” said Ashni. “At
the proper hour.”
A skin seemed to tear, across his sight, across his entire body. The dismemberment was painless but total, and the whole of it lifted away and was gone.
He lost nothing, only this, which had come between him and existence. He understood who he was and how he came there, all that had been, everything he had participated in, even the death of Lyki.
And he understood also who the elegant bandit was, standing with him in the rain in the colonnade. So he drank the wine, which had a wine taste now, and nodded.
“Thank you, Tuab Ey.”
“Ah,” said Tuab Ey. His eyes were wide, but he added flippantly, “And who in Aarl are you?”
“Your guest.”
“Called?”
“You may not accept my name, seeing we’re here.”
“Try,” said Tuab Ey, and waited as if he would wait forever.
And having become himself, he said quietly, “The son of Raldnor Am Anackire, the brother of Raldanash, Storm Lord of Dorthar.”
The wide eyes could widen no farther, so they half-shut.
“I’ve heard of you. Rarmon Am Karmiss.”
But he said: “My name is Rarnammon. After the King who built the city.”
• • •
“You lost your prey, Kathus.”
“No, my lord. Free Zakoris lost him.”
“Zakoris,” said Yl, “does not trouble too much.”
Kathus showed nothing, which was not uncommon. He was able to conceal disappointment, if he was disappointed. He had lost Raurm son of Ralnar in the moment Raurm’s sanity gave way. The plummet into Thaddra’s jungles was only a formality.
When the fire smothered in the rain, those that could do so went in search. The blundering track of the palutorvus was at first very evident, but later less so. They picked up fragments of chain and wood. In the end, there had been a succession of clearings, and here they were deceived and the trail eluded them. By Yl’s order, the overseers were beaten with rods, but not put to death. From this, you told he did not rate the misadventure very highly.