The Noborn King

by Julian May

  Culluket said, “If Celo cracks, the others should fail into your lap like ripe oranges.”

  “Ready for juicmg,” the jester agreed “Well, how about it? What say we get back to Goriah and start polishing up the fancy armor!”

  He launched them and their animals into the air, still fending off the rain, saying to Mercy, “I hope old Peliet and his sages are right about the rainy season being almost over. I’m still a little green at levitating big groups. And there aren’t any computerized flight vectors to help a guy fly through soupy mountain passes in this Pliocene Exile.”

  Mercy laughed gaily, “You’ll manage somehow, my tricksy one. “You nonbom kingling from far Dalriada six million years hence! And had some fine Italian genes migrated to stern Scotland? And had they gone on, frozen in vitro, to burgeon again in an obstetric lab on a Milieu planet, engendering this strange young man who was determined to make her his queen’s?

  Whose portrait had worn Aiken’s face?

  The train of riders sped through the sky toward Goriah, where glass turrets shone against a widening patch of blue. The obsessive question gnawed at Mercy and spilled over into an inadvertently projected thought.

  Aiken’s mind was elsewhere; but the Interrogator responded with flawless courtesy, on her intimate mode:

  May I assist your recollection with my special talent Lady Creator?

  If you would Redactive Brother. This maddening image! If you could sort out my memories and let me put a label to it.

  A matter of utmost simplicity for a redactive specialist. . .

  Oh!

  I’m glad the revelation amuses you, Lady. I must agree that the resemblance is remarkable what a dangerous-looking fellow that Florentine politician seems to be! Some day you must tell me all about him.

  11

  THE FARSEEING RAVEN RANGED ABOVE THE MAGHREB SHORE. The rains had brought grass and drifts of pink and yellow flowers to the slopes, and all the gullies were turned into slim oases that seemed to point in astonishment toward the new blue sea. The bird rejoiced in the many-colored landscape. Natural beauty, more than anything else, helped her to keep the terrors at bay. Aloft in spring sunlight, climbing the wind above this world she had helped to create, there was sanity and forgetfulness.

  She detected sentient life—and gold.

  Her mind engendered a psychokinetic gale and she sped eastward. The initial flare of life-aura fell below her farsensing threshold, but the predatory bird managed to track it into a wooded ravine with steep sides. The scent of precious metal, living and dead, excited her to the point of madness. She accelerated her metapsychic wind until black feathers ripped from her pinions and she shrieked with pain and elation. And then she arrived, calmed the air, and landed on an outcropping of rock near a trickling spring.

  There in a tittle clearing, one Tanu castaway knelt beside another’s body. The raven studied them, feeling that she knew this pair.

  They were identical twins. This was clear in spite of the fearful head wounds that disfigured the corpse. The weeping survivor was still beautiful, with the classic features of the Host of Nontusvel. He had evidently just returned from hunting, for the body of a fawn gazelle and a crude spear fashioned from a glass dagger tied to a sapling lay on the ground beside him. He wore rose-gold rags, and the dead twin was similarly dressed in remnants of Psychokinetic Guild finery.

  It seemed that the dead man had been unwilling to wait for his brother to return with food. A clump of deadly pink narcissus growing beside the spring had been partially grubbed up, and one half-eaten bulb lay on the ground.

  The gigantic raven lifted her shoulders. Her harsh call—pruuk pruuk—caused the mourner to look up, trembling and wide-eyed. With great interest, the raven perceived that this twin was literally half-wined. He and his brother had evidently shared a mental symbiosis of the utmost intimacy; they must have been capable of mighty feats before the Flood had smashed them and marooned them here in North Africa. But with the death of his brother, the living twin was reduced to a state of latency even lower than that of a “normal” human being.

  The enormous bird glided down to stand near the head of the corpse. The bereaved Tanu stared mutely at the bird, his green eyes dim with tears and his mouth a taut square of anguish. Only when the raven’s beak poised above the dead man’s throat did the other cry out:

  “Fian!”

  She did know them, these rose-gold twins! A paroxysm of anger dissolved the bird body, and a slender human woman wearing blue glass armor stood there. She wore no helmet and her hair was a buoyant platinum cloud. Her eyes flashed with the wrath of Hecate.

  Kuhal Earthshaker recognized her, too. He remembered the vast dark room inside the Coercer Guild stronghold, the massed force of Nontusvel’s Host awaiting the human assault on the torc factory, the Lowlife saboteurs armed with iron. They had been led by this small awful woman. Kuhal remembered psychocreative detonations, falling masonry, mental and physical strife—and the glory of the Host victorious amid the smoke and blood, in spite of this female monster’s power. This was Felice, who had slain his sister Epone and vowed to destroy the entire Tanu race—only to fall defeated in Imidol’s ambush and then submit to Cullukel’s torture.

  Felice laughed. She held his puny consciousness as if in a pair of tweezers and poked among the wreckage.

  Kuhal and Fian! My Beloved’s brothers. What a funny kind of mind . . . you were the left hemisphere and he was the right. A syzygy, an aion couple! Kuhal Earthshaker the Second Lord Psychokinetic and Fian Skybreaker his better half!

  Her mad giggling coarsened into grating croaks. The great raven again flapped black wings and Kuhal cringed away, both hands gripping his golden torc.

  Felice’s mind-voice turned petulant:

  But where is the Beloved where is he? I call and call and only the faraway devils and the nonborn Shining One answer. They try to trick me! I reject them. He is the only one I love and want! Where is he who willed my destruction and instead raised me to operant life?

  Kuhal whimpered aloud. His broken identity teetered on the edge of dissolution.

  Cull is gone! And Imidol is gone and Mayvar and the King and the Queen and the glorious Battlemaster! They are all gone. As dearFian my Self is gone and i/-am alone and powerless. You have conquered avenging DeathBird.

  The raven’s glittering eye seemed to wink. Once again her cruel beak approached dead Fian’s throat. The knobbed catch of his golden collar rotated, impelled by Felice’s PK, and the semicirclets opened. The bird jerked the gold free.

  Now the living twin groveled on the ground. His arms were wrapped protectively about his own neck. Derision colored the raven’s thought:

  Oh ... keep your torc for a while, Earthshaker.

  She leapt into the air, carrying the gold, and set off for the Spanish mainland. Kuhal uttered a single mind-cry, so profound in its desolation that it rang from one end of the New Sea to the other. Then he collapsed unmoving.

  * * *

  Felice crossed the Mediterranean and flew tirelessly into the Betic Range, up the valley where the swollen Prolo-Andarax raged through jungles on the flank of Mount Mulhacén. Even in the time of the Galactic Milieu, Mulhacén thrust above the rest of the Sierra Nevada and had small glaciers on its shaded slope. In the gentler Pliocene Epoch the mountain rose some 4200 meters, with snowfields only on the summit.

  The bird flew higher and curved around to approach the north face. The growth of tropical hardwoods gave way to laurel thickets. In more arid places there were pines and tangled rhododendrons bearing clusters of white or carmine blossoms. A sabertooth cat sunning itself on a rock yawned. Its slitted eyes followed the giant raven, puzzled by the glint of gold against the sky.

  She rode an upwelling air current that let her view the distant turquoise embayment of the Gulf of Guadalquivir to the north. Beyond that hunched the Dark Mountains where wild Firvulag lived. She side slipped, lost altitude, and dived toward the inviting gorge of the River Genil, nearly home at
last after the long day’s hunt. Rock thrushes and warblers trilled a welcome. Fat brown trout leaped in the river. As usual, her friends waited outside the entrance to her lair. Otter with his gift of fish. Roe Deer and her child, who would share sweet milk. Yellow Panda holding tender bamboo shoots fetched all the way from the lowlands. Squirrel and Woodrat with nuts and mealy tubers. Dwarf Mastodon cheerfully waving a branch with gleaming purple fruits.

  Felice stood before them and smiled, holding the golden torc. “See? Another one!”

  The lynx Pseudaelurus, rubbed adoringly against her bare legs. The other friends, basking in the warmth of her mind, crowded close with their offerings. She accepted them all: the food, the garlands of flowers brought by the weaverbirds, the fragrant dried grass that the mice and coneys had heaped for a fresh sleeping couch. “Thank you! All of you,” she said, dismissing them after they had had their fill of communion.

  The sun set and a chilly wind began to blow from the Genil Canyon. Several of the song sparrows lingered to sing to her while she kindled her fire with mental flame and got supper cooking. As often happened in the evening, the devil voices started in again, telling their lies and displaying their marvels, reminding her how they had helped when her strength failed at the sundering of the Gibraltar Isthmus.

  She ignored them, and presently the devils fell silent. Mad she might be; but she wasn’t foolish enough to mindspeak them on a far-carrying mode that might betray her precise whereabouts. Let them just try to triangulate her! Let any of them try—the faraway devils, Aiken Drum, or even futile Elizabeth! Felice knew how to hide from them. (And she only called for the Beloved from high in the sky where there was no danger.)

  The cooking fire fell to embers. She made the verandah area of her lair neat and then stood quietly for a moment under the brightening stars. It was good that the rain was nearly over. The flowers in her hair and around her neck exhaled a richer perfume now that they had begun to die, and that was good, too.

  Felice took Fian’s golden torc and entered the cleft in the mountain. She could see quite well in pitch-darkness, but she wanted to enjoy the treasure at its best, and so she lifted two fingers and generated a bright flame of psychoenergy. The mica-laden rocks glistened. Her den was a talus-cave, not one carved by water, and the interior was perfectly dry. Beyond her steeping place the way was blocked by a slab of rock weighing many tons. Felice waved the torc at it negligently and the rock slid aside.

  In the smaller chamber behind, gold lay piled in heaps higher than her head: a Niebelung hoard acquired through four months of patient searching. These thousands of exquisitely fashioned mind-amplifiers had once clasped the necks of Tanu and their privileged human minions, liking their latent brainpowers into metapsychic operancy. But now those proud torc wearers were dead in her Flood, their bodies swept from the submerged White Silver Plain and flung up for the scavengers to find—and Felice. She had robbed bodies rotting in the shallows and sought out skeletons buried in silt. And when this plunder dwindled she hunted down wretched survivors and seized gold from those too weak to defend themselves from a bird with a body longer than a human arm. She fought them fairly and refrained from using her operant powers in offense. Beak and talons alone were usually sufficient to defeat the demoralized castaways who once had lorded it over the Many-Colored Land.

  Felice pitched her new acquisition onto the nearest pile. There was a rich clang as the equilibrium was upset. Golden torcs went slipping and rolling in all directions—to reveal something else, half-hidden in the tangle of precious metal.

  She lifted it easily in spite of its considerable weight. It was a great lance of gold-lustre glass, attached by a cable at its butt to a jeweled case, from which hung broken straps. Felice brandished the Spear and pressed one of the studs on the armrest. As usual, there was no result. Immersion in salt water had shorted out the photon weapon’s power-supply module. It was as inoperative as it had been when Felice took it from the real Bright Lugonn at the Ship’s Grave.

  The false Shining One had duped her later and got the Spear away; but the Flood fixed him. Now the Spear was hers again forever.

  She lay the trophy gently on its bed of gold and left the treasure-cave for her own couch of dry grass. The middle of the night brought cold air from the mountain summit, and she had the nightmare again. But toward dawn, when the lynx curled up at her feet to keep warm, Felice slept in peace.

  Kuhal Earthshaker lay insensible throughout most of that day, crushed by bereavement and Felice’s desecration. When he finally awoke, evening had come, and with it small things seeking his brother’s body. Cursing, he drove them away, and then set about washing and preparing. There were no fresh clothes; but around Fian’s neck he hung the heavy Janus-face medallion of their joint escutcheon, the only ornament that they still retained.

  He carried Fian to the shore, then brought down the coracle. Setting his brother adrift, he knelt on the salt-crusted rocks and tried to sing the Song. But without Fian, there would never be music again, so he merely recited the words. Once again, out over the water, he seemed to see a glowing city in the haze. Fian in his skin boat followed the light-path that led to it, going home.

  After a long time Kuhal summoned up his last reserve of strength. His farspeaking voice shouted: Wail for me Brother!

  And a disembodied answer came:

  So there you are!

  The reverie of grief vanished and Kuhal again knew terror. He stood paralyzed, staring at the luminosity out over the sea. It was no pearly mirage this time but a harsh glare, krypton-discharge green, rapidly growing in intensity. A farspoken voice emanating from the light spewed obscenities about the aether and addressed Kuhal on the intimate mode:

  Why the bloody hell you been hiding in frogfucking basalt ravine instead of staying in open where I could track you down? We heard your Fiandeathshout all way over in Afaliah!

  A Tanu knight all armed in glowing aquamarine and riding an enormous chaliko materialized out of the mist and floated down to earth.

  “Celo? Is it you?” Kuhal’s physical voice was a cracked whisper.

  “Of course it’s me, you poor stupid shithead. Who else? I’m the only levitant left with the power to carry another, short of that little gold rapscallion or Tonn the Turncoat. And small chance they’d come and save your ass!”

  “I thought . . . Fian and I thought that we were atone. The only ones left.”

  The fierce old face with its silver brows glowered. Celadeyr of Afaliah sent an inexpert redactive probe into the younger man’s deranged mind. “Great Goddess, what an idea! But I don’t wonder you thought so, considering the state you’re in. We’ve managed to rescue other survivors, but all from Aven or the European shore. How in Tana’s Name did you ever get yourself marooned in Africa?”

  But Kuhal did not reply. He had fainted.

  The old hero of Afaliah gave vent to his pity in more curses. He spotted the coracle far out on the water and used his creative power to englobe it in a pyre of astral flame. When he had sung the Song for the dead twin, he loaded the living one behind him on the chaliko’s broad back and launched them into the air.

  12

  ELIZABETH RELAXED HER CONCENTRATION AND SMILED. “I’M glad he was finally rescued. Poor man. Imagine him thinking he and his brother were the last Tanu alive.”

  Creyn could not help the thought: I remember Another who also despaired at being alone.

  “I learned how wrong I was.” (The deep doubt persisting was far beneath Creyn’s perception.)

  The Tanu healer reached across the table with his long arm and poured more coffee for both of them. Thunder grumbled around the heights of the Montagne Noire. Rain started again, spraying the small leaded window panes on the eastern side of the chalet until it was impossible to see outside.

  “Aside from Culluket,” Creyn observed, “Kuhal Earthshaker is the only High Table survivor of the Host of Nontusvel. The other fifteen members of the Host who escaped the Flood are minor talents.”


  “I presume that Celadeyr will put Kuhal into the Skin and try to cure him so that he can be enlisted into the disloyal opposition. After all, the Second Lord Psychokinetic would be quite an ally if his powers were restored. What are the odds for full recovery?”

  “Not high. The Skin depends not only upon the skill of the practitioner but also upon the patient’s own willpower. And Kuhal has lost half his mind. Celo’s healer is Bodurago, a competent enough operator—but I doubt whether even Dionket himself could restore Kuhal completely. Even under the most favorable prognosis, he’ll be laid up for the better part of a year.”

  “His power of telepathic projection was almost nil,” Elizabeth said. “I had no idea the twins were there in Africa until Kuhal gave that terrible cry last night.”

  There was a simultaneous flash and explosion as lightning struck Black Crag Lodge for the fourth time that stormy evening The electrical charge drained harmlessly away.

  “With all these atmospherics,” Creyn remarked, “I wonder that you’re able to farsense to Africa at all. I find that my own mental vision is completely blocked beyond Amalizan. But then, I am not a Grand Master.”

  She smiled at him, setting down her cup. “No But it’s time I began teaching you some of the specialized techniques of higher farsensing. The static filter is well within your competence, given practice.” She demonstrated the program and worked with him, strengthening and correcting, while his wide-field farsight strained to penetrate the ionization of the storm.

  Finally, she told him: Enough.

  He sank back into his chair, his ageless seraph’s face bathed in perspiration “Yes. . .I see.” The mind-tone was rueful. “I also see that I have a depressing amount to learn before I can be of much assistance to you in your surveillance.”

  “Have some more coffee,” she suggested. “It helps. We’re lucky that the bush thrives here in the Pliocene. . . But seriously, you can be a real help to me, even now. I’m still not as strong as I was back in the Milieu. I must use a disproportionate amount of effort just to maintain the focus at great distances. You can be an extra set of mental eyes if you link up with me during observation—seeing details I might miss.”