The Carnelian Throne

by Janet Morris

  He did not again win the battle for consciousness until the sun was high, and then remained as he had wakened, slumped in a tangle, his head pressed to the earth, consumed with the ineffable sadness we feel when we find ourselves wounded; a sadness not for the self but for the mangled, recontoured limb. It is the body’s emotion, deeper than a mother’s grief for the stillborn, and it racks the strongest as completely as the coward. In its grip he was a child.

  As a child he looked around him, accepting the death strewn about with no understanding. There was a long-bodied sorrel campt staring unblinking at him, its broken tusk of no more moment to its owner. Atop its snakelike back sprawled an ossasim: a wehr-master with wings cut to streamers. The significance of this was lost upon him.

  He collected two thoughts: the pouch about his waist held a needle, and line used for fishing. He would ... But it lay not about his waist, and he recalled when he had dropped it. The second thought was the proximity of a memnis tree, and for that he would need a knife. He had had one.

  So the two thoughts became four, and the four cubed, and he began to crawl in ever-widening circles about the clearing, detouring carefully around the slain.

  It was the knife he found first, but he did not stop: he was afraid that if he halted he would not move again. So he crawled farther, noting on his infinitely slow journey every detail of what lay in the clearing, as is the way of the mind when it is threatened with extinction. So he noted the great green-metaled sword, and the smaller one gleaming clear as mountain water, though he could place no value upon them. Still, he had not looked upon his left arm, nor did he until he held the precious pouch and struggled with the shaking fingers of his right hand and his teeth to extract the bone needle and the fishing twine from within.

  Threading the needle was harder. His eyes jumped in his skull, and one hand was not sufficient, and he ended with the needle stuck into the sod, he lying with his cheek to the ground and his hand propped on a flat rock, that he might drive the crimped twine through the needle’s eye.

  When this was done, he muttered the Law of Nature’s Compassion under his breath and began sewing up as best he could the hand’s breadth hole above his elbow.

  Have you ever done this? Sewing one’s own wound is different from seeing it done: as dissimilar as the sight of one’s own lesion, from that of another’s.

  The punctures were not painful—his flesh was already giving its all in pain, could not add more. But the tying of the knots, the pulling tight of the twine which he accomplished by holding one end in his teeth, broke a cold sweat onto his brow. Each time he pulled the flesh together, saw the twine protruding from his skin, he was forced to stop, to wait until his stomach ceased bucking. When finally all but the round center (and this concerned him: a round wound is the hardest healing) had been sewn together with the irregular stitching of an apprentice seamstress, he sank back on the ground and let the fit of shivering consume him.

  The work he had done danced before his eyes, the black twine a crazy quilt, a barbaric road map of what had occurred. After a time he forced himself to assess it, its irregular contours, its, length and breadth. He knew the scar would look ill, that the flesh would heal with all the humps and bumps it now displayed, but it was an intellectual knowledge. He uttered an animal growl and levered himself up, first securing the knife in his too-small sheath, and sought the memnis tree on the clearing’s far side.

  When he gained it, he scored the white bark deeply with the white-bladed knife Chayin had given him to fight wehrs, the knife he had employed to murder a ptaiss. At that thought, he muttered harshly again, and drove the knife more strongly into the memnis’ bark. Then he peeled the oblong section of bark from the tree and repeated the process on the moist, greenish inner bark. This oblong strip of sticky fiber he wrapped around the wound, binding it there with the remains of his twine.

  Then, with a sigh of satisfaction, he gave up consciousness once more.

  The next waking was easier: the memnis was about its work. He dared a testing of his left hand. The fingers moved, if stiffly. The lances of agony that ran from fingertip to shoulder when he moved them cheered him. He had been afraid the hand would remain numb, the fingers useless.

  He attempted a squat. Though he swayed, he held it. Using the memnis for support, he attained his feet. Then he leaned his head against the velvety bark and laughed, a slow-starting chuckle that grew until it racked him with shudders that threatened to throw him to the ground. When the laughter ceased, he was much shaken by its visit, not understanding why it had come. He would not understand for a very long time.

  Then he shied away from even the direct consequences before him. He would do something, but he was not yet ready to determine what. He sought a blank mind, that comfort he had obtained so dear and which had served him all his life. He could not regain it. So he settled for a simulation, and did small things: he took steps, he sought the two swords he had marked in his crawl about the clearing. The white blade was lodged in the campt’s breastbone and when he had finally tugged it free he was dizzied, panting, ravenously hungry.

  And what his mind told him to do affronted his Beneguan soul. So he locked his soul in a hastily constructed cage in the back of his mind and slit the campt’s belly and ate of what was within.

  Almost, he could not retain it, but at length he wiped the blood from his mouth and set about finding a way to carry the two weapons of strange metal with him.

  At last he lurched into the forest thickets, scorning the path and the flesh-scraping jicekak that raked him as he pushed ever deeper. He had bound the two blades together with the placenta-stiffened hide which had been the spirit-woman Estri’s tunic. This, with a cord he had scavenged from the intruders’ camp, he had fashioned into a rude scabbard. Of what else lay there, he took nothing: their food was not recognizable to him as such, and their various garments were either too small, too large, or too alien. The bow and arrows were splintered, useless.

  And he was anxious to quit the clearing. The bushes rustled with life. He heard low growls and the pad of feet and the passage of great bodies through the trees. But no vengeance descended on him from out of the forest. He was breathing easier, and hurting more with the ebb of anesthetizing fear, when the whelt suddenly darted down from somewhere in the laced labyrinths of the wood’s leafy roof. Twittering softly, it hovered before his face.

  “Leave me be, whelt.”

  The great-winged whelt pummeled the air, slowly retreating before him. Its size and banded leg showed it to be the one which had earlier given him Mahrlys’ message. He batted his good hand at it, but it only twittered. The air from its wings brushed his face.

  “Whelt, go away. I must find some vabillia root—if I do not, I will die. I have neither the time nor the strength to be a problem. Spying upon me will be fruitless.”

  He stumbled over a protruding root somewhere in the knee-deep brush he trod. When he righted himself, the azure and indigo wings still beat an arm’s length before his eyes. He well knew whelts, and they no more flew-backward than they twittered softly, delicately attentive before one’s face. And, too, this was Mahrlys’ creature: no whelt of such grandeur inhabited the seaward forest. The band proclaiming this winked balefully at him.

  For a while he plowed onward, the whelt ever before. Thrice he stopped, leaning faint against tree trunks, and the whelt each time alighted on the closest bough, twittering. On the last of these occasions, it reached its head down toward him, long neck stretching, silver neckband ruffed.

  “Whelt, I can take no message. My mind is fogged. Whelt—”

  But its cheek brushed his, and a thousand pairs of eyes regarded him down an endless arch of tunnels, and from those depths came the compassionate murmur of thrice a thousand voices ....

  He gasped and pulled away, pressing his throbbing head against the moss that cushioned the tree’s crook. No message from Mahrlys had he received. He struggled briefly with the complexity of the experience, then recoiled from
it: the whelt’s name was something close to Kirelli and through Kirelli Deilcrit had glimpsed something of Wehrdom. No man meets Wehrdom face to face and survives! Unless ...

  He heaved a sigh: he seemed very much alive. Once, while a young boy, he had seen a whelt kill a youth with whom he had only moments before been playing at bonethrow. The whelt had descended in a thunder of wings and rushed at the boy, fastened its claws into the child’s eye sockets. It had been a terrifying death to witness, and this whelt’s odd behavior had minded him of it.

  He heaved himself away from the tree to speak to it.

  There was no whelt upon the branch.

  He clutched the tree, and his head spun. Could it be that no whelt had ever been there?

  He staggered, half-running, half-stumbling through the brush. He pushed himself, purposefully unthinking of anything else, until he reached the spring by whose rocky basin grew the vabillia, and behind which lay a small cave, hardly longer than his body and so low and shallow that it would hold him like a cocoon. There he scrabbled among the stones until the yellowish, conical root was torn loose from the water-washed rocks to which it clung.

  It took time to peel off the woody outer bark, to separate the meat from the spiny central core. Then he chewed the bitter pulp until it was dry of juice, carefully saving the masticated, fibrous remains. If he lived the night, he would try to redress his wound with it. If not, his sleep would be euphoric ....

  As the drug reached its downy fingers into his brain, he took the green-bladed sword from its makeshift sheath and cut brush, which he arranged on the ledge before the shallow cave until the whole of the shelf was blanketed. Then he crawled within the rustling sentinel he had created, vabillia pulp in hand, sure that nothing could come upon him in the night without him hearing its approach. Nothing but a whelt. And assuming that the drug did not send him to that sleep from which no creature wakens. Vabillia, most efficacious and poisonous of all Benegua’s pharmacology, was so potent as to be used only when there was nothing else ....

  Crouched panting at the cave’s mouth, he surveyed his work. He grunted, and took one last look around him into the waning day. No whelt.

  Feeling cheered, he knelt and lowered himself lengthwise into the cave, truly little more than a crevice. He had remembered it larger, or had he been smaller then? Carefully he eased within, back to the wall, left side uppermost. He had made certain that the softest, leafiest branches were those closest to the cave, and as he dragged the cuttings toward the cave mouth, covering himself to the neck, he had one clear moment of elation, of triumph. Then the vabillia took true hold on him and he barely had time to drag close the final, hairy-petaled branch and twist himself comfortable before sleep took him. Thus he missed the sunset through the glade’s latticed branches, and the whelt’s return.

  He would have sworn to a thousand years between that taking and his next wakefulness he had dreams enough for that many years. Epic dreams, dreams in which he wielded the baleful green-metaled sword against an endless multitude that would not remain dead, though their blood spouted until it became a rushing river that engulfed him. He was swimming for shore against the current when he woke.

  To find the whelt peering patiently down at him from the branches of a memnis that grew at the pool’s edge. Beneath the branch, piled neatly on an arching root, was an assortment of fruit.

  He did not immediately do more than ascertain this, through the hairy-petaled cuttings that protected his face. Unmoving, he was free of pain. (The dull ache of flesh pressed the night long against cold stone was hardly worth counting.) So, there was a whelt out there. A flare of resentment rose in him, then subsided. He put the thought of it away, turned to his body’s needs.

  He pushed back the brush and rolled from the shallow cave, each movement teaching him new parameters of pain. His whole left side seemed afire. The bands of muscle about his chest screamed their definition. He could not straighten his left shoulder, and the agony of his left arm swinging was such that he had no alternative but to hold it steady with his right hand. Thus he ended scattering the brush with his feet. Kneeling to drink was an absorbingly complex affair, whose strategem was not wholly successful: he moaned and rocked back and forth on his knees, fighting dizziness. But at length he had drunk and relieved himself, and even rubbed water over his begrimed face.

  “Whelt,” he grunted as he eased his blistered booted feet into the pool. “You will have to come to me.”

  “Kreesh,” answered the whelt, and came, swooping upon the way to snatch a ripe peona melon from the pile at the memnis’ foot.

  Deilcrit started to shake his head, gasped in pain, and turned cautiously to face the whelt that alighted at his side.

  He looked from it, to the glossy black oval of the peona, then back.

  “Kirelli,” he ventued, trying what he thought to be the whelt’s name for the first time. “You are a wehr, are you not?”

  The green eyes regarded him soberly, unblinking. “What does Wehrdom want with me?”

  The whelt pushed the melon toward him, butting it with his cruelly curved beak. Then it stretched out its neck, as if with a message.

  “No!” he exploded, throwing himself backward, forgetful of his wound.

  It was a time before the pain left and vision returned. The soft sobbing sound he had been hearing ceased when he realized his own throat was its source.

  The whelt was perched upon the melon, wings half-unfurled.

  He pushed himself up awkwardly. “Go away. Wehr! I ...”

  And the soft touch within his mind stopped him witless. Not all whelts are wehrs. Nor are all of any species. Not until Wehrdom scythes through the forest, leaving all manner of beast dead in its wake, is it known which are wehrs and which are not. Then ptaiss turns upon ptaiss and campt upon campt, and all the wehr beasts drink the forest’s blood. And when it is over, and the forest is calm once more, they graze and nest and burrow beside their prey of only days before. Those wehrs that are known are shown deference in the way of their species, according to the members’ society. In man, as in beast, the wehr rules. And it is either death to taste of Wehrdom, or something most unthinkable, more awesome perhaps than death itself: Wehrs speak only to other wehrs and their chosen. This latter possibility was one of which he strove not to think at all.

  “Wehr, I will be certainly dead by morning. Go tell your mistress—”

  The whelt let out an ear-splitting squawk and pumped its wings.

  “Pardon,” he said automatically. “I assumed ... You do wear Mahrlys’ band.” Most whelts are not wehrs at all; these can still carry such a picture as messaging requires. None of his whelts had ever been wehrs. He supposed dully that wehrs, even be they whelts, might well be touchy as to rank. But he knew nothing of Wehrdom. He said this.

  The whelt responded by hopping off the melon, neck extended. It did a wing-flapping dance in his direction. This time he had not the will to rid it. And then he understood more than he cared to of Wehrdom. Kirelli, prince of wehrs, had chosen him. Against all odds and until his death (privately Deilcrit thought that this would not be too long, so the whelt princeling risked little), Kirelli would succor and protect him: he was wehr-chosen. He interpreted this from a flood of flashing pictures as awash in his mind, from the touch of myriad other minds behind the whelt’s, minds that sent homage and welcome incomprehensible to him. So spake the whelt? In substance, though Deilcrit saw and felt emotion with the seeing, rather than hearing language. And then he did hear language, perfect, multitonal, a liquid sound that seemed to come from the exact center of the back of his head: “Allow me to guide you; when that is past, to accompany you; when that time too is gone, to follow. And but recall, in future, that I was first to aid you.”

  Deilcrit awkwardly dragged his feet from the pool, thinking that he would not much longer recall anything. “Let me be,” he mumbled blurrily, and heard: “I will.”

  The wehr Kirelli seldom again spoke to him in this fashion, and for a time h
e tried to believe he had imagined the incident; he was too much a Beneguan to think otherwise, to repudiate all he had been. He would not believe until it was forced on him, much later. He said: “Let me be, whelt!”

  Accepting the command, the wehr burst into flight, and alighted on that same tree branch where Deilcrit had first seen him waiting.

  Somewhere within him he was glad that the wehr was not going to kill him. But it had not told him why it was not going to kill him, and this bothered him: he had killed a number of wehrs. Surely Wehrdom would strike him down, not just, as was so obviously the case here, monitor him until his death. So he spoke to himself, insistent, as if no wehr had just proclaimed fealty.

  He decided to eat the fruit, and ignore the whelt. After he had eaten the fruit he began to wonder what he would do if he lived. First he considered living the day, then the night, then what he might do if indeed he survived the wehrs and his wound.

  He tossed off the whelt’s presence: he had always had a way with whelts.

  He found it relatively easy to edge his way around the bank to the pile of fruit on the memnis’ root. When he had eaten his fill, he slept. He admitted to himself, just before dreams took him, as he shifted the makeshift scabbard tied around his waist and gently positioned his left arm with his right, that the whelt was a wehr. The wehr might be lying. Then he thought that it did not really matter, unless he awoke. His last thought, that of having been unable all day to walk more than a few steps at a time without rest, led him into dreams of interminable trekking.

  When he seized consciousness once more, the rain was falling, the midday sky sagging with its weight. Through the gentle screen of the steady drizzle he could see only a short distance, but he saw well enough to know that there was no whelt, wehr or otherwise. He rubbed his forehead. Even slick with rain, he could feel his fever. He pushed himself to a sitting position, and with the strangers’ knife slit the twine around his memnis-bandaged arm, peeled back the softened bark very slowly, biting his lip until it bled. At last, with a rip that took half the new scab away with the bark, he stripped it off, washed the wound, and examined it.