by Tanith Lee
“Probably, my Kathus, the beast headed for the swampy ground, and the Prince was sucked under there.”
“Probably.”
“We shall see to it Dorthar receives tidings of demise. Yes?”
Kathus acquiesced.
They had gained the end of the stone corridor that ran beneath the palace at Ylmeshd. A great door of trunks braced with bronze was hauled aside. The King and his Counselor entered the cave temple of Rorn.
Free Zakoris had decided to honor all the old ways.
Three male slaves were to be drowned in the sea pool before the god’s altar. The King would not officiate, these were minor ceremonies.
The thickset priests, naked to the waist and kilted in long folds of leather, waded into the pool. As they forced the struggling men under and held them there amid a chaos of churned water, Kathaos Am Alisaar looked on, impervious, polite.
Violent murder did not oppress him, and he was not superstitious. And yet Free Zakoris offended him aesthetically and in most other ways. He had sunk to this, and knew it.
He pondered idly, as the churnings in the water faded, if Dorthar was worth such dealings in brutish mindlessness, or if he would even have Dorthar, when everything was said and done. The long game had failed him so far. Why not once more? Was the extraordinary happening in the jungle a foretaste of failure—as a similar happening had been, almost thirty years ago?
There was a sudden tiresome inertia on him. He knew no trade but this, intriguer, game-player that he was. He could not live any other way, so was condemned.
• • •
Shaved if not shorn, the man with a king’s name, who claimed to be the son and brother of kings, began entirely to resemble one himself. He moved among the robbers with ease, yet they were aware of a superiority—nothing he set on them, only something which was. If what he had told Tuab Ey was correct, then he would be used to command. Grudgingly, they acknowledged it, and grudgingly, growling a little, gave him room, picked no quarrel. The passing of the madness was wonder enough. And he could obviously handle himself if it came to a fight. Altogether they fared better with the palutorvus, which they regarded as a symbol of status to their adversaries, and had made into something of a pet.
Rarnammon, anyway, was not much with them.
He walked about the ruined city, almost as if seeking some hidden thing. This interested them rather. Maybe there was a cache of gems or gold or arms he knew of and they did not. But seeing Tuab Ey tended to go about with him, and Galud not much behind, they must trust to that.
In the first days, Rarnammon quartered the city. Tuab Ey acted as a guide, for he had come here more than once, alone or with his pack. The land rose and fell in the valley, and the ancient streets ran up and down in humps and hollows. Here and there were the bandit nests, standing houses or mansions that had been possessed and now held long enough to merit the chiefs label upon them—Scarecrow’s Villa, Jort’s Wall. When cook-smoke went up, they were in residence. To the west, where the jungle had encroached most vehemently and only a few frames of masonry stayed upright, there was a small leper colony. It had its own well, and kept to itself for fear of instant spearing. On the white alleys, the ochre figures moved weightlessly, dying shadows without faces.
At noon, seated on a high terrace, Tuab Ey pointed out a certain flower that was commencing to nose its way up through the paving.
“The year’s turning, Rarnammon. Over the mountains the ice will be starting to heave and crack.”
“And when the sea’s open,” said Galud, who was watering a pillar, “the Leopard moves north, east, west, and south.”
“The war will get here. But you’ll be going back to Dorthar to meet it?” said Tuab Ey.
“No,” said Rarnammon.
Tuab Ey said lazily, “He’ll need you, won’t he, your illustrious brother?”
“Yes,” said Rarnammon. “Not necessarily beside him.”
“Enigma.”
“Fact.”
“Well? I’m your host, remember. Tell me.”
Rarnammon, who was looking down, a long slow look, at the city, smiled. He did not say anything.
Galud stood scowling at them, and then walked from the terrace and some way off. He supposed they were lovers and was jealous, although his own coital inclinations did not run that way.
Tuab Ey stretched himself out for the sun.
“So, you won’t tell me anything.”
“I shall find a suitable place and remain alone there. Wait.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. I only know what I’ve told you.”
“You’re a mystic, then.”
“Maybe.”
Tuab Ey moved on to his belly, leaning up on his elbows. He stared at Rarnammon until, feeling the powerful gaze, the elder man turned.
“You said alone. Or shall I come too, and act your page, lord King’s son?”
Initially he did not know what Rarnammon would do now it was said, and Tuab Ey experienced again the unaccustomed, uncanny sensation that was like awe. But then Rarnammon grinned, and the grin made him very young.
“A mystic remains celibate,” he said. Tuab Ey found himself grinning too, charmed or provoked into it. And then Rarnammon turned away again toward the north. “My father was in Thaddra,” he said. “If he didn’t transmute into fire or ether, then he’s still there, somewhere. Part of the stones, perhaps, or the black light through the trees.”
Tuab Ey shivered in the bright heat of noon.
“My own father,” he said, “had dealings of escape with a slave-trader, whose name was Bandar. Bandar, whom I saw as a child, was a fat and insalubrious oaf. He had one story he always forced on everyone. How he carried Astaris into Thaddra as a slave—not his fault, of course—and she was pregnant with Raldnor’s child.” Rarnammon did not glance about at him, but he was listening. Tuab Ey continued deftly. “There was another story, of a wolf child, in the northern forests—you know, a baby left with wolves and reared by them to be a wolf. Except wolves are scarce this side of the mountains. More likely wild dogs. But the child was said to be supernatural, white as pearl and winged, with a star on her forehead—” He stopped because Rarnammon had softly laughed. “Well, I never believed a word of it,” said Tuab Ey, and gave himself up again to the sun.
22.
THE EASTERN ICE began to break. It was like the sound of the earth tearing apart.
In Dorthar, as the marble world gave way, mankind began to move more plentifully on its surface. Through mud and milky rains, a small caravan ploughed toward the capital, Anackyra. Then skirted it, made on toward the hills, Koramvis, the Lake of Ibron, where they said a mighty statue lay asleep; Anackire, dreaming. . . . The poor wagons were escorted by soldiery of the Storm Lord, which seemed to have been sent to meet them. In the villages and towns they passed, the blazon of the Serpent and Cloud was sighted and remarked upon. Occasional strange rumors flew back and forth. A poisoned well had been found clean, after the caravan had stopped beside it. A woman going out to mourn her dead returned without her sorrow. Someone sick had been cured, after the shadow of something, a cart or a snake, had gone over him as he wandered at the roadside.
A group of Amanackire were seen riding toward the hills above Anackyra.
There was a faint shock on the plain, in the city. Nothing gave way. Many did not feel it.
Vencrek, privately approaching his King, with whom he had spent time but never precisely known when they were children at Vathcri, said, “Raldanash, you can tell me anything about these tales of a priestess given royal escort to the ruin up there?”
Raldanash said, “The tales are true.”
“Who is she?”
“A priestess, as you said.”
“There’s, a lot of common talk—”
“Yes,” said Raldanash, with one of the rare flashes o
f humor, “there often is.” And then, quite lightly, conducting the Warden to the great table-board which described, approximately, the surface of Vis, Raldanash began to discuss with him the strategies of war. They shifted the small carved galleys, and the units of men and cavalry about, with wands of ivory. Such plans of attack as offered had been revised since Prince Rarmon’s traitorous withdrawal—or abduction. Spies had brought word he was dead. This too might be a lie.
Although he had got no answer to his curiosity, Vencrek succumbed to the charisma of his King. While some part of him stood sophisticatedly aloof, the cousin from Vathcri was yet flattered and warmed to play war-games alone with Raldanash. It did indeed, rather disgracefully, become a boys’ game in the end. Drinking the mulled wine, briskly deploying the ships, the Lord Warden consented to be Free Zakoris, and sometimes Karmiss, to the Storm Lord’s Dorthar. When Vencrek lost he let out a boy’s roar of outrage, and then caught the joke. “By Ashkar. Let’s hope they play as messily as I do.” And heard Raldanash laugh, which was more of a rarity even than wry humor. And remembered he loved him, a male love, not sexual, love of the blood, love of the honor and the steadfast integrity of Raldnor’s son.
And when, later, Raldanash fell asleep before the columned hearth, as if immensely tired, Vencrek looked at the beautiful unhuman face, touched and almost angry at being so trusted.
• • •
In Ommos the Dortharian garrison had been increased. Four and a half thousand of the Storm Lord’s men augmented the Ommish defenses. There was also a company of mixes, almost two thousand strong, and freelance mercenary units, Vathcrians and Tarabines, though the pure Shansarians had gone away.
Ommos was afraid.
The last war had raked her over. Like Zakoris, she too had been scourged and shamed, but Ommos had none of the valor of Yl’s long wish to fight back, only the suppuration of puny hatred. She feared the Sister Continent men who were there to help her, as she feared her own Lowlander Guardian and the white-haired King in Dorthar. The hero Raldnor had remained anathema to Ommos. No one loved her and she loved none. Only in corners, where a peculiar radiance had brushed in passing, had the mood softened and strengthened in different form. In the alleys of Hetta Para some still spoke of a long-haired religious—a boy, the dream must be translated—who was tolerant and kind to them. Zarok had been shown in another guise. The image of Anackire, which had likewise been shown and which, some said, had left an imprint on walls, had also in a mysterious way been Zarok. It was explainable as a female alter ego, which they could respect at last, the cloak of the god.
But these pockets of retention and strength were small. Ommos had never been fertile soil for things of light. A fire-worshipper, she had lost even the light of her fires. They were dulled by blood. She was like Free Zakoris, too, in that.
• • •
In Xarabiss. Thann Xa’ath had not hung back, as his father had, waiting to see how the cat might jump before he moved.
Then again, the fiasco of Ulis Anet’s escapade with her guard commander had brought considerable embarrassment. Though Xa’ath did not entirely accept the case as presented—there were other notions (she had in some way annoyed Raldanash and been quietly smothered?)—yet he was obliged to observe diplomatic rules. Thann Xa’ath must act, therefore, as if owing an apology to Dorthar. He brought his army smartly into the field, and dispatched a vassal’s token four thousand troops to Raldanash, to deploy as he saw fit. They were on the march before the snow was gone. Slung with spitting braziers, they tramped through the endless rain of the thaw. Thirty men were lost in a boiling river near the Ommos border. But it had been necessary to bustle this spring.
Thann Xa’ath had insufficient imagination to dwell on the price of defeat. He operated the engine of war pragmatically. His court, ostensibly, kept pace.
But out in the crystal cities, in their theaters, pleasure-houses, wine-shops, the talk and the imagery were more honest, or more illuminating. The plays put on were froth—farces, with often a bitter sting in the tail. Acrobats walked wires above the mouths of starving tirr. Escape; dancing with death. Conversation conveyed actual peril. Seers cried aloud in the streets that doom approached. No one laughed. All would be beaten flat, rinsed with blood, with flame—ashes.
There was nowhere to run to.
Even so, as the spring unlocked the roads, they streamed away, to villas, to farms, to remote plains and isolate hills, aristocrat and beggar alike.
Perhaps here, or there, the black and taloned paw would not find them out.
It was a curious fact. Most of them boasted a victory for Dorthar and the Middle Lands. None of them seemed able to trust in it.
Free Zakoris wanted, and would have. Karmiss, the unknown crouching thing, would go for the throat of whichever went down.
A few privately commandeered vessels put out to sea, making on battered sails for the Sister Continent. The weather was uncertain. No word came back from them. Nor any word or ship from those who had voyaged from Thos at the summer’s end.
• • •
Southward, the southern extremity of Vis: The Lowlands. It had remained generally a kind of desert, still. And here, the mantle of the snow yet held awhile. On the wide plains the villages had drawn in to themselves as they had always done, tight, unburgeoning pads behind their stockades, revealing no aptitude for spring, let alone politics. Closer to Xarabiss, the towns of the Plains—famous Hamos, coastal Moiyah and part-built Hibrel, having molded to the northern spirit, and the ways from over the ocean, had formed their armies long since. Dortharian and Vathcrian war leaders had drilled their men winter through in the stone courts. Even a band of Shansarian berserkers had remained, a couple of thousand men, at a camp a mile or so from Moiyah. There was a small Shansar fleet as well, thirty swan ships, ice-choked on the beaches there. But gossip said they would, troops and galleys both, be off to Shansarian Alisaar, when once the seas relented.
It was also known that with the thaw Dortharian troops would be garrisoned at Moiyah. She had come to represent a key position to the west and would certainly be threatened. So far the numbers were not noised abroad.
Of the arcane city, the ruin, nothing much was said. It was thought to be no prize either for Zakorian Leopard or Karmian jackal. Already fallen, hiding no treasures, unstrategic—it was left to its own devices, its own silences.
Report suggested certain villages of the southern south had packed up and traveled there wholesale, as had happened three decades before. For sanctuary, presumably.
An itinerant hunter, having come northwest to Moiyah, enlisting under one of the Vathcrian commands there, regaled his battalion—Lowland men, men of the other continent, mixes, Xarabs—with an inexplicit memory of something seen in or near the ruin, over the snow.
He was strongly called to account by his Vathcrian captain.
“I can’t say, sir.” A Lowlander and a peasant, knowing the linguistics of the dark races, his childhood spent with little speech, much telepathy, he seemed now calmly at a loss. “It was sunrise. The light hit the flank of the city—or maybe it was some other thing—it was far off, sir, perhaps only rocks or trees. But there looked to be great towers of gold.”
The Vathcrian, who was younger than the hunter, anxious and furious at the war, needing to fight something he could see and hack, rejoined:
“We’re up against a hell of a thing here, soldier. We don’t need visions and dreams and make-believe. We need guts and an army. No snow-mirage ever won a war. Do you understand?”
The hunter who was now a soldier said that he did.
Only later did the Vathcrian realize he had inadvertently communed in his home-tongue. The Lowlander, ignorant of it, had got the sense by reading his mind.
• • •
Across the Inner Sea, Alisaar, the Shansarian fortress, stared in all directions. Carved ships patrolled her waters, up and down, up and down,
over and over, like clockwork things. The snow had only sugared her eastern and southern edges, as always. But the voracious winds of the cold months had lashed her. In the Ashara temples Shansar had set up, prophecies were made and auguries read. A secret worship had commenced, native Alisaar going back to her own gods, if she had ever left them.
Across the incoherent border. Old Zakoris, Sorm of Vardath’s dainty from the Lowland War, had also manned every perimeter. The three brief lands, Iscah, Ott, and Corhl, had been sworn to vassalage twenty-five years before, and were substantially under Vardian influence. But Alisaar had become an unknown element to the south. North, the watchtowers eyed the Thaddrian borders; mountains, forest. Particular attention was paid to that threat of Yl’s South Road.
Where Vardian Zakoris mountainously touched Dorthar, the passes were held by mutual armies. On the Dortharian side, the Storm Lord had instigated several Vathcrian companies, who now tended to squabble with Sorm’s Vardish men. One forgot, but Vathcri and Vardath, at home, had once been traditional enemies themselves.
In Old Zakoris, the Zakorian race had prospered under Sorm. He had not deprived them of their religion either, and the fire and water gods still exalted there, if no longer in some of their more brutal rites. Nevertheless, Zakoris was Zakoris. They had the same blood as the Black Leopard of Zakoris-In-Thaddra. Soon they would be called upon to slaughter their racial brothers, even, in some cases, their actual brothers. They had not deserted with or to Yl, which to the Leopard must be the unforgivable crime. A conqueror, he would give no quarter. The Mother-Kingdom would be destroyed. Not one stone would stand upon another, nor one skin upon one set of bones.
And so, belatedly, several did desert, somehow evading the watches and patrols, getting over the mountains or through the jungles into Thaddra, hurrying to Yl’s standard. Others simply ran—to Alisaar, to Dorthar—where they were betrayed and arrested instantly. Or into Thaddra also, but merely to be lost, as Thaddra’s custom was.
But it could not be told enough: In the end there was and would be nowhere to run to. This war was a wave, the world an open shore.