by Tanith Lee
The Free Zakorians, for one, must now be in serious doubt. You did not race to such a confrontation with such a miniature force. Could their information be wrong? To Karmiss-In-Lan, the look of it would be much the same. This was no punitive expedition. Kesarh was going, not to assault, but to woo them. Maybe they recalled, no one played the suitor better.
• • •
In the foredeck cabin the physician, having opened Kesarh’s mailed sleeve, viewed the inflamed and ragged wound in his forearm.
“So slight a cut, but refusing to heal. It bothers you, my lord?”
“Yes. It bothers me.”
“I think there’s some festering. The knife had been in fruit, you say? I regret, we must cauterize.”
“Then do it.”
• • •
In Lan, though spring promised excitement, the long snow had already not been dull.
Raldnor of Ioli, slain by maddened patriot or paid assassin, had left Amlan in some confusion. The young Prince-King, Emel son of Suthamun, had heard of the event with obvious alarm. He shed tears in the presence of the soldiers, who thought it not unseemly. He was only a boy, and Raldnor had been a father to him. But the mourning went on, and Emel, having locked himself away, stayed locked away. The soldiers became restive.
During the first days following the assassination, a council was formed comprising the several captains attached to Raldnor’s monopolies. Needless to say, squabbles had soon broken out. Before the month was done, there had been fighting in the streets between the cohorts of this and that commander. On the last day of the month one of the council was found dead in a wrecked wine-shop. A batch of days into the succeeding month, a few other captains met nemesis—one in a trough of sheep-swill, which provided inspiration for the army’s poetic side.
There ensued an inevitable relay seizing of power. Two officers grabbed it, were murdered, two others were elected by cheering soldiery in the Palace Square. These held on for quite a while. The end came when a man rode into the city of Amlan from the south. He brought with him a thousand Karmians, some his own, others he had gathered up en route, and was pitched into a sudden siege when fellow Karmians slammed the gates in his face.
During the second night someone opened the gates, however, and the arrival arrived, with all his men. What had swung the balance was the uncertainty now rife in Amlan. The newcomer had once been a guard in the private army of Kesarh. He still seemed gilded by authority.
Biyh had been sent to Elyr with a small command, to reconnoiter and suborn, not long after he had returned with his King from Dorthar. Biyh had no ambition, or thought he had none. He was a dogsbody, a jack, would take on any job—guard, warrior, messenger. As Prince Rarmon himself had noted, Biyh had not gone up in the world.
But something in the turmoil of Lan, the indigenous revolts, the takeovers and plots and spontaneous slayings, had pushed him to a sort of precarious eminence. Rather to his own startlement, Biyh had snatched his chance. Maybe seeing Rem’s elevation had given him an appetite.
Getting Amlan, he took down the current leaders. Biyh meant only to imprison them, but the men were in a nasty mood and tore them to fragments in the Square.
Biyh began to tidy up the city, which was in a sorry state. He trod on no toes, distributing wine and beer and women liberally, producing the figurehead Emel—Biyh knew the worth of a figurehead—to help implant the notion of fair behavior and honor.
Biyh even visited the brother-sister Lannic King and Queen in the royal apartments. Pale under their darkness, they tolerated him. He was genuinely glad to see them still receiving food and comforts in their interior exile. Native Lan needed its figureheads, too, and Biyh had half feared he would find them lying on the woven carpets in a suicide pact.
One evening, Biyh also paid a longer than usual visit to his postulant King.
The boy had seemed doleful from the start, and frightened. Now, alone with him, Biyh beheld terror.
“It’s been a bad time, this, my lord,” said Biyh, who was never above platitudes, “but you must bear up. Recollect your father. The men love you. Karmiss will be yours.” Biyh did not in fact believe this. He intended to make overtures to Kesarh when the weather broke, and hand everything back to him, Emel included, providing he, Biyh, gained by it.
Emel, who surely could not have guessed, began to cry.
Biyh patted the youngster’s shoulder, and had a curious impression the boy was perfumed, if very faintly, with a woman’s scent.
Remembering how Am Ioli was supposed to have concealed him, Biyh waxed inquisitive. On some pretext he next morning raided Emel’s sleeping-room. Emel, who had lived with shrill panic since the day of Raldnor’s death, was able to hide and evade only so much. Biyh let out a laugh. Something in the type of laugh encouraged Emel; he had heard it before, and that had been in bedchambers, too.
In a while Biyh said, “Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret,” and sat down on the bed. Half an hour afterwards, he was in it.
It so happened. Biyh’s tastes ran to such dualities as Emel’s. Also unlike Raldnor, Biyh was sexually well-mannered.
Emel found himself all at once cherished and petted. Here was one lover who did not disappear, one protector who did not loathe and carp, or mean to be rid of him. Safe at last?
• • •
When he had been nothing in the world’s eyes, Kesarh had ridden back from Tjis to the capital in a brazen chariot, a flare of swords, a rain of flowers, and Istris handed her heart to him. A King, he walked into Amlan.
The crossing had not been rough. Ulis Anet could not, he once thought, have prayed hard enough—or the bane had stayed in the knife. The three black shadows, though, had kept behind them. The ships of the Lily docked, and the shadows anchored on the horizon. It did not matter for the moment, might even prove useful, this appearance of a Free Zakorian rear guard.
The troops were thick in the port. Events had been sorted six days ago, after further information boarded Kesarh’s ship: A spy from along the coast who rowed well. The successive juntas now had names, and the current ruler, Biyh, was once a Number Nine, whose thousand men swelled the three and a half thousand at Amlan. As the snow receded other areas had declared for Biyh—or in error for Raldnor, not knowing him to be dead. The puppet “King,” said the spy, was Suthamun’s son, or a crafty double dug from somewhere.
As the oars of the boat brought him in to shore. Kesarh estimated the armored phalanx screening the wharves was two thousand men at least. They did not block the way in, but they could close like jaws on whoever entered.
They were not sure, yet, if it could be him. If he could be such a fool.
Then the boat grounded. He stood up and stepped over on to the ice and shale, then straight up the great stair on to the quay.
Discipline had grown flabby, and a vibrant mutter began to run at once. Most of them knew him by sight, considerable numbers had spoken with him, or supposed they had, in Karmiss, when the Lannic adventure was mounted.
Presently the sounds died out. They stared, metal and faces and the metal faces of shields, hostile and ungiving. They were out of love with him now, Am Ioli’s falsehoods, and the riot and the rift from homeland, had seen to that, and the blank cold madnesses of the winter.
Kesarh stood, alone, in their midst. He had left the rest of his men behind on the ships. They, too, had thought him insane, but admired it. They knew his gambit. They said to each other, it would be possible to walk after such a man into fire. As they sat on the ships.
He was not wearing black, but the salamander scarlet, with the lizard emblem in gold on breast and back—like a target. The hair-fine coat of steel was worn under it, invisible. They only saw he was unarmed. No sword, no dagger, not even the knives that could be carried in sleeves or gauntlet-cuffs or the cuffs of the high boots—they squinted after the tell-tale lines, and they were never there.
Minutes dropped away, and nothing else happened. Finally, two of Biyh’s freshly appointed captains came forward and met him.
They did not know, of course, what to say to him. They were in declared arms against him, and here he was, empty-handed, serene, kingly.
“My lord,” one of them blurted, “what is it you want?”
“My destination,” he said, “is the city.”
“I can’t answer for the men,” said the other. “Your life’s teetering on two thousand sword-points. Why don’t you go back to your pretty ship? They’d probably let you.”
Many heard this. The air was conductive, the acoustics rather good. An uneasy jeering noise went round, and metal clacked on metal. When it stopped, Kesarh spoke again. He spoke over the captains’ heads to the two-thousand-odd soldiers who hated him, with a lover’s hate, abused. His voice, the actor’s voice trained long ago, used always to effect, traveled to almost all of them.
“These men are Karmians, as I am. I don’t fear my brothers, gentlemen. Shall we get on?”
He started to walk then, and as he did so, the jaws began to close on him. As they closed, he made spontaneous contact with them. He had—and used—the magic thing, recall. He recollected names, personalities, officers and rank and file alike, human beings he had met years before, exchanged one word with. He blazed there in the raw colorless day, his scarlet like a beacon, the salamander targets crying out to them where they might strike. When they jostled him, he touched them. His hands were steady, reassuring, gentling them like zeebas or horses. When they pressed closer now, it was to touch in turn, no longer rancor. Where they could not see him, they shinned up walls.
And now, the accusations came, because they felt they could talk to him.
Already on the Amlan road, going toward the city, this huge cloud of men—the port left nearly defenseless. Kesarh, they said, or King, Shansarian fashion. It had none of the smack of insolence. It was the intimacy employed in religion.
Why? they said. Why withhold supplies? Why desert us here? Why the wedding with Free Zakoris?
He exonerated himself. He told them the game to be played, Lan the bulwark, Free Zakoris the stepping stone. Vis the stake.
His voice, reaching the perimeters, translated into the pockets where it did not reach of itself, stimulated them. His strength and his certainty, the easy confidence, each of them his counselor, consulted now, given reasons. And all the time he was in the midst of them. The guilty man did not come naked and fearless into the lions’ pit. One who did not love them, moreover, could not trust them so.
There was a flat-topped rise by the road, and they urged him up on it.
He stood above the road and the metal cloud, talking to them, familiar, as if every one of them knew him well. The sun blushed through and laid its patina on the hills, the ice, on him.
He told them some joke, and they laughed. And there was some banging of fists on shields.
He had not discounted them. They were not blamed or shamed or to be set on. It seemed there would be riches ahead, beside which Raldnor of Ioli’s “bounty” would be dross. And he was too, the magician Raldnor had never been, and that no other was.
And then someone came running, and thrusting out of the crowd, bawled at him:
“Suthamun! Suthamun!”
“Yes,” said Kesarh. “What of him?”
“His son,” the man shouted hoarsely, “you murderer—”
“No,” said Kesarh.
It was apparent then, the superstition, the sway of the pale races also wielding vast power.
Their heat had frozen suddenly in the sunlight, his two thousand brothers, Visian Karmians, mixes, the few score Shansarians, of whom this shouting man was one.
“I had thought,” said Kesarh, “Emel son of Suthamun died of plague. Raldnor told me this. You yourselves believed Raldnor’s lies. And so did I. Emel was his pawn. If it is Emel.”
They yelled out, wanting to absolve for him their wrong of rebellion, to give it credentials: “Yes! Emel! Emel!”
Again he waited. When quiet came he gazed at them. It was as it had always been. His courtesy and his arrogance. They had been noticed, as was their right, by a god.
“I recollect Emel very well,” he said. They were listening, bound. “The might of the goddess,” Kesarh said. “She crushed Suthamun’s dynasty, and left only Emel behind it. They say the goddess dreams the world. We’re just the pictures in Her brain. If Emel lives, then the kingship is his, Karmiss is his, you, gentlemen, and I, all his.” He looked at the Shansarian and said, in the Shansarian tongue of Suthamun’s court, “As She wills it.”
He walked most of the way to the city with them, and at midday they shared food with him on the road.
At some point a King’s agent, concealed till then in the crowd, broke the careless ranks and returned to the port, so to the Lily ships: “Not won yet, but winning.”
• • •
It was farcical, and diverted him. Somewhere else, in the core of heart or mind, it enraged him. That he had come again to this, this striving, this unavoidable tax paid the conquerors, the Chosen of the goddess. One of whom had casually seeded Kesarh himself. Unknown father. Only the always-weeping wretched woman wandering at Xai, that black-haired Karmian princess, abased and pining, like some pathetic bitch-dog. Hanging herself for Val Nardia to stumble into the cold feet. Their mother. Damn her. She had understood the sorcerous weight of the pale races. She had let it annihilate her. But he, Kesarh, had dragged the legend down. Only to have it rise again. The snake at Tjis. The snake which had been a sword.
The light fever was beginning, just a fraction, to blur the edges of his judgment. Not enough to be calamitous.
The doctor on the ship had proved incompetent. The hot iron had not been applied for long enough, and the infection reinfested the little cut in his left forearm. It would have to be done again.
When the moronic soldiers had fumbled against him on the road, finally lifting him and bearing him into the city, the whole arm had sung out, a low, dense note of pain. Kesarh dealt with that because he had to. But each man who clutched him he could have killed. In the city, on the steps above the Palace Square, where the brother and sister King and Queen had formerly given audience, he had gone through the entire theatrical once more. And taken them once more.
They seemed to be his, now, the four thousand, five thousand troops at Amlan.
It only remained to deal with Biyh. That should not be too difficult, there had been an obscure message left at a village up the coast, Biyh’s offering, all reverence and fidelity.
And then, to round off this bloody day, the inevitable acknowledgment—on the steps, elevation, and proximity to the stinking drunken rabble of soldiers—of the Prince-King Emel.
Somewhere in the war, Emel was again about to die. Obviously.
But it should not have been necessary. Should not have been here for him, this pitfall. Raldnor overreaching himself, Suthamun, damnable Ashara-Anackire—
“That may be of help, my lord.”
The second physician—the other was laid up, a flogging—straightened from his task. The wound, now packed with medicine, seemed numbed, but not eased.
“Tonight,” said Kesarh, “come back here and cauterize it. This time, efficiently.”
“Don’t worry, my lord. I saw what happened to your other attendant.”
“You were meant to. What’s this?”
“Something to cool the fever.”
“And which will make me drowsy? Do you suppose I can afford to sleep her
e?” Kesarh pushed the cup aside and it fell to the floor. The arbitrary violence was unusual. As a general rule, Kesarh was fair to underlings. The wine merchants of Karmiss, who had rebuilt their trade on his patronage, adored him, praising his magnanimous charm and personal power. The very men outside, despised, would have fought Free Zakoris for him this minute. That had been part of the spell in the old days, too. Even those who were accorded punishment felt they had been singled out.
Rem . . . Why was he thinking of Rem-Rarmon Am Dorthar. Raldnor’s son. Riding, somewhere, on some errand—Val Nardia’s child. No, it was himself, riding to Ankabek which was no more. And the child . . . No, the child had been a nightmare. It had never happened, any of that.
The second physician, who had got in only an hour ago, with the rest of Kesarh’s slight staff, bowed himself, unseen, out.
Biyh was the next visitor.
Kesarh had ordered himself by then.
They went through everything. The obeisances, the fawnings, the agreements. Without doubt, Biyh had been constant. He would be rewarded. A knife’s length between his ribs before summer. But one need not explain that.
Knives. That brainless Xarabian mare. Had her knife been anointed?
Even from a battlefield no wound had ever festered. That flying splinter in the sea-fight off Karmiss, which should have put out his eye, deflecting, leaving a clean scar hardly visible.
Only the snake at Ujis had ever poisoned him, and that at his own discretion. The scar from that was clearly marked. It lay half an inch above the spot where Ulis Anet’s knife had gone in.
Val Nardia, threatening him with just such a tiny knife, unable to use even her nails against him. She had found it simpler to harm herself.
“You did well, Biyh,” he said. “I shan’t overlook it. You’ve earned Lan’s Guardianship, at least.”
Biyh, missing he had been given what he already had, flowered into idiot grins.
“But Emel, my lord?”