by Lynn Abbey
As for the other guests, beside Javed and Mahtra, there were the Quraite druids, all eight of them, including the young half-elf Hamanu had met before. Beyond-the-walls druids weren't the only guests in Pavek's house; there were Urikites, too, eating at his table, and not merely the strays he'd swept off the streets: A cheery earth-cleric helped himself to a handful of dried berries while a smattering of merchants and artisans—most of whom would not have nodded to each other on a sunlit street—talked softly among themselves. That they spoke naively of an unattainable future didn't diminish the remarkable nature of the gathering, especially in the red-striped home of a high bureau templar.
Pavek was a remarkable man, sitting at the foot of his own table—when he sat. Somewhere in the house there had to be servants, but Pavek was the one who poured wine for Manu and anyone else who needed it. He was the one who brought fresh food from the sideboard and carried away the empty bowls. A truly remarkable man, Hamanu decided as he sipped his wine and settled among the cushions. Quite possibly remarkable enough to evoke a miracle.
Hamanu's spirit was as calm and optimistic as it had been since he'd left Tyr, which, perversely, left him thinking not about where he was or with whom he was, but about Windreaver. Having put himself in the midst of friends, the immortal champion found himself with nothing to say, except to an ancient troll he'd never speak to again, no matter what happened tomorrow. He hadn't helped himself, either, with his choice of illusion.
He'd made himself Manu as Manu had been in Deche. Smooth-chinned and slight, that Manu appeared years younger than the rest of Pavek's atrium guests. He was a child among adults, and they patronized him. Hamanu could have aged himself: Manu had been a hardened veteran by the time Myron of Yoram snatched him away from the trolls in the sinking lands. Lean and scarred, he could easily have been mistaken for a half-elf, if there'd been half-elves in those days and if he hadn't been short-statured, even among humans.
But, then, being mistaken for a half-elf wouldn't necessarily make Manu more welcome or more comfortable in this gathering. The only half-elfin the atrium was Ruari, the youngest of the Quraite druids, who'd collapsed under the weight of his terror a few years ago when the Lion-King had asked him his name. Surrounded by congenial folk on the opposite side of the table, Ruari wasn't talking to any of them, nor they to him. All Ruari's attention went into his wine cup, which had been filled too many times.
Among the numerous legends that attempted to explain how Athas came to be, there were many tales of elves and humans. Half the tales maintained that elves were humanity's first cousins, the oldest of the Rebirth races. The other half, predictably, maintained that elves were the last, the youngest, the race that yearned in its heart to be human again. All the tales agreed, though, that elves and humans found each other considerably more attractive than either race found their inevitable half-breed offspring.
Frequently abandoned by their parents, half-elves were a dark and lonely lot. A casual stroll through any slave market would uncover a disproportionately large number of half-elves, as would a roll call of the templar ranks in any city. Hamanu had always found them fascinating, and in this gathering of Pavek's friends, none was more fascinating than Ruari.
Ruari's aura was all defense, closed in on itself; it posed no challenge for a champion's idle curiosity. There was nothing about Ruari's life that didn't yield itself to Hamanu's very gentle Unseen urging. The young man had all the earmarks of a typical templar: a vulnerable heart, an innate conviction that he'd never be treated fairly, a greater appreciation for vengeance than justice, and a quick and cruel temper. There were scores just like him wearing yellow in this quarter and scattered through the encampments outside the city walls. But Ruari had followed a different path. His mother had been a free elf of the tribes and the open barrens, and when she abandoned her rape-begotten son, she'd dropped him in Telhami's arms instead of an Elven Market flesh-peddlar's. Telhami had reshaped Ruari's destiny, channeling all his empathy into Athas until she'd made a druid out of him.
Pavek's efforts could go for naught, too, before this night was over. Ruari was so handsome, so attractive, with his shades of copper hair, skin, and eyes; and Windreaver was an aching hole in Hamanu's spirit that hadn't begun to heal: Hamanu hid his hand beneath a cushion. He made a human fist and let an unborn dragon's talons dig into the heel of his palm.
He should have taken Manu outside the walls to Lord Ursos's estate, where catharsis—especially the catharsis of pain and fear—was an every-night ritual.
A sudden movement on Ruari's shoulder startled both the half-elf and the Lion-King. Half-elves had a special rapport with animals, which Ruari's druidry enhanced. The house critic—exhausted, no doubt, by children who thought it was a brightly colored toy—had taken refuge behind the copper curtain of Ruari's hair. But Manu's presence had roused it from its slumber. Both youths, Manu and Ruari, looked up from the slowly stretching lizard and met each other's eyes.
Look away quick, Hamanu advised, but druid-trained Ruari resisted Unseen suggestion.
Ruari's eyes narrowed, and he tried to stop the critic from climbing down his arm. Outrage, jealousy, and envy erupted from the half-elf's spirit, piquing the attention of the other sensitives in the atrium. Pavek, who alone knew how hot the fire Ruari played with truly burned, was frantic in his determination to break the attractive spell between them.
Pavek might have succeeded. Critic minds didn't comprehend sorcerous illusion. The critic saw what it saw and placed its feet accordingly. Once the lizard had ambled across the table and begun its journey up Manu's arm, Hamanu had to pay more attention to the substance of his illusion than to the half-elf glowering at him.
Then someone—possibly Javed, Hamanu quite didn't catch the voice—said something about the ways in which a veteran might fortify himself before a battle that might well be his last.
"I know what I'd do," Ruari interjected boldly. His narrow-eyed stare was still fastened on Manu, whom he clearly considered younger and less experienced than himself. "I'd find myself a woman and take her back to my room."
But Ruari didn't stop there. He went on, describing his wine-fueled fantasies—and they were fantasies. Hamanu perceived that on the top of Ruari's thoughts: the boy had dallied, nothing more. Pavek told his young friend to be quiet. By then it was too late.
Too late to visit Lord Ursos.
Too late for Ruari.
Though Pavek tried, putting himself squarely between them when the supper was, at last, concluded and the guests were departing. Ruari was the last to find his feet. Lopsided and stumbling from the wine, he aimed himself at an open door and headed off, alone, for his bed.
"He's hotheaded and harmless," Pavek insisted, and beneath his words the thought: If you must consume someone, Great One, consume me.
That would have defeated Hamanu's hopes and intentions entirely. They were alone now, except for the critic still balanced on Hamanu's shoulder. The lizard never flinched when Hamanu remade his illusion, becoming the tawny-skinned, black-haired man Pavek knew—or thought he knew—best.
"You will come to the southern gate at dawn."
They stood face-to-face, Pavek a bit shorter now, but not falling to his knees.
"I know."
Hamanu unslung the scroll case. "For Urik." He placed his unnaturally warm hands over Pavek's and molded them over the scuffed leather. "When I am gone, you will raise that guardian spirit of yours."
"I will try, Great One."
"You will not try, Pavek. You will succeed. You will raise Urik's guardian. You will evoke every power it possesses, and you will destroy me, Pavek. That is my command."
Rajaat, the Dark Lens, the Gray, the Black, and a dragon, they were all just words to Pavek. He tried to rank them in his mortal mind, but for him, there was no catastrophe greater than Urik without its Lion-King.
"You'll know, Pavek. You'll know when you see what I become. Your conscience won't trouble you."
"But Rajaat—" the temp
lar protested. "A dragon will protect Athas from Rajaat, isn't that true? Isn't that what the dragon—what Borys the Butcher of Gnomes did for two thousand years?"
Rajaat wasn't Pavek's worry. Rajaat would be Sadira's worry, and Rkard's. Rajaat would be their punishment for doing nothing when they could have put an end to both Rajaat and dragons. Hamanu wouldn't talk to Pavek about Rajaat.
"Borys was the Butcher of Dwarves," Hamanu corrected gently, after forcing the War-Bringer out of his mind. "Gal-lard was the Gnome-Bane; he took the name of Nibenay after Borys became the dragon, which was a thousand years ago, not two thousand."
"But—" Pavek had been educated in the templar orphanage; he knew the official history of his city.
"We lie, Pavek. We've all lied; all the champions. When the wars ended, Tyr measured its years from one High Sun solstice to the next, a full three hundred and seventy-five days, but Draj and Balic measured theirs by equinoxes. Their years were half as long. Albeorn—Andropinis of Balic—didn't want to be associated with the champion Elf-
Slayer. So we lied, we took history apart and put it back together again so mortals who might remember the Cleansing Wars might never think that we had led them." Hamanu squeezed Pavek's hands tighter around the scroll case, then let go. "This, and this alone, is the truth. Keep it safe."
Pavek frowned. The gesture tugged his scar and caused a twinge of pain, which Hamanu shared.
"You should let me fix this."
"More illusions? More taking history apart and putting it back different?" Pavek asked.
"You'd be a handsome man. Women would notice."
"It's not my face that keeps Kashi away," Pavek said honestly.
And Hamanu had to agree. He traced the ugly scar with a fingertip, but left it alone. "Good-bye, Pavek, Just-Plain Pavek. It's time for me to go."
Pavek started to nod, but his chin stayed down against his chest. "I will miss you, Great One." His voice was thick. "If ever I have a son, I will name him Hamanu."
"Kashi won't stand for that," Hamanu said as he turned away.
He was halfway to the door when Pavek called him back.
"Telhami—" the templar began. His face was raised; his eyes were glistening. He had to begin again. "Telhami will be waiting for you."
Hamanu cocked an eyebrow, not trusting his own voice.
"When... if... you'll become part of the guardian after, Great One. That's what she says. And she'll be waiting for you."
He hadn't thought about after; it gave him the strength to turn away and walk out the door.
Chapter Fifteen
Ruari had wedged himself into the corner where his narrow cot met the walls of his room, the better to keep both cot and walls from swaying wildly. His eyelids were the heaviest part of his body, but he didn't dare let them close. Without the moonlight patterns on the wall to tell him up from down, he'd be overwhelmed with the sensation of falling backward, endlessly falling backward until his gut began to heave in the other direction.
The half-elf knew this because it had already happened, not once, but twice. He'd shed his reeking clothes outside the room and crawled the last distance to his cot on his hands and knees. His mind wasn't working particularly well, but it seemed fairly certain that he'd never felt quite this sick, this stupid, this drunk before. Given a choice between death right then or holding the walls up and his gut down until dawn, Ruari would have chosen death without hesitation.
"Preserve and protect," he muttered, the conclusion of a druid blessing the first few words of which he'd forgotten.
Grinding his heels into the mattress, Ruari pushed himself backward, but his legs were weak and the walls of Pavek's red-and-yellow house were made of brick, not woven reeds, like the walls of his hut back in Quraite. Terror seized him when she reached the cot and laid a surprisingly warm—for death, anyway—hand on his foot.
Terror was nothing Ruari's wine-drenched gut could handle at that moment. He made a desperate sideways lunge. Death caught him before he hit the floor.
"You shouldn't drink so much," she chided him.
Death smoothed his dank hair behind his ears—which Ruari didn't appreciate. Ears were supposed to match and his didn't. One of them was more tapering, more elven, than the other. He tried to hide the defect; she caught his hand before he caught his hair.
"Relax," she suggested, raising his hand. "You'll feel better." She pressed her lips against his knuckles.
Very warm lips.
Very warm and relaxing lips.
Ruari did feel better than he had a moment ago. His gut was calmer, and when she put her-arms around him, the room no longer threatened to spin wildly, either sideways or backward. He protested when she released him, but it was only to stand a moment while she undid the laces of her shift. It fell in a dun-colored circle about her ankles, revealing soft curves that glowed in the moonlight.
Ruari rose to his knees, balancing easily on the knotted rope mattress. No trace of his drunken unsteadiness remained in his movements when he welcomed her.
"If you're not death," he whispered in her ear, "who are—?"
"Shhh-sh," she replied, surrendering to his embrace.
Entwined around each other, they sank as one onto the bed linens.
Later, Ruari thought they were flying high above the city.
* * *
Pavek didn't try to sleep, didn't bother going to bed. After the midnight watch bells rang, when his household was at last asleep, he took a lamp and Hamanu's scroll case back to the atrium. Sitting where Urik's king had sat in a youth's disguise, Pavek cleared a place on the littered table and unrolled the vellum sheets.
He set aside the ones that he'd already read and started with the score or so of boldly scripted sheets that his king said contained the truth. Pausing only to refill the lamp when its light began to flicker, he read how Manu became a champion, how a champion cleansed Athas of trolls. The air was cold and the eastern horizon was faintly brighter than the west when Pavek came to the last words: the onus of genocide, rightfully, falls on me, on Hamanu. His heart was far colder.
Not long ago, on a night when he'd bandaged the Lion-King's hand, Hamanu had told him that no mortal could imagine or judge him. As he rolled the vellum and stuffed it into the case, Pavek tried to do both, and failed. He couldn't imagine the forces that had transformed the young man who'd come to his house into the champion who stood and watched the last trolls march silently to their deaths. More than that, he couldn't imagine how the man—and despite the vellum, Pavek thought of the Lion of Urik as a man, now, more than ever—he knew had remained sane.
And without knowing that, without being absolutely certain that Hamanu was sane, as mortals measured sanity, Pavek couldn't begin to judge his king, his master, and— Whim of the Lion—his friend. He could confidently judge Rajaat more evil than Hamanu, but that was no sound footing for judging Hamanu.
The eastern sky was definitely brighter than the west when Pavek sealed the scroll case and got to his feet. His gold medallion thumped against his breastbone. He drew it out and studied the rampant lion engraved on its shiny face. While he wore a medallion, be it gold or cheap ceramic, Pavek was a templar. A templar obeyed his king and left the judging to the guardian.
Lamp in hand, Pavek went from room to room, awakening the Quraite druids whom he'd asked to join him on the south gate tower. Twice before, he'd awakened Urik's guardian spirit and brought it from the depths of Athas to the surface where it had guided him and preserved him. Hamanu believed the city's guardian could surmount one of Rajaat's dragons. After reading the vellum sheets, Pavek was less certain than ever. He was a novice in druidry, with only his devotion to his city and—yes—his devotion to the Lion-King to sustain him. He'd try to justify Hamanu's faith in him, but didn't want to be standing alone on the south gate tower when the Dragon of Urik came calling.
Five of the six druids were awake when Pavek came looking for them. Ruari's cast-off, reeking clothes were heaped outside his door. Considering
how much the slight half-elf had drunk the previous evening and how unaccustomed he was to wine's perils, Pavek expected to find his troublesome young friend curled up on the floor, still too far gone to rouse. Instead, when he opened the door, his lamp revealed an empty room.
The bed-linen was disheveled. The patterned lattice night-shutters weren't merely open, they were gone. And there was a woman's shift on the floor beside Ruari's cot.
Clutching the neck of his shirt and the gold chain beneath it, Pavek shouted Ruari's name and got no response. He levered himself over the high windowsill and peered down into a night-dark alley, two stories below.
Nothing. By then, the other druids had joined him. They searched the house frantically, as aware of the brightening horizon as they were of the missing half-elf. A search of the alley produced a pair of shattered night-shutters, nothing more. A search of all the inside rooms brought word that there was a young woman missing, too.
"She got up in the middle of the night, my lord, put on her shift, and went to the door," a somewhat younger girl explained to Pavek. "I asked her what was the matter, and she didn't answer. She didn't seem to hear me at all. It were passing odd, my lord, but I didn't think no harm would come of it. Whim of the Lion, my lord."
To no one's surprise, the girl identified the linen garment Pavek held in his hand as belonging to the missing woman.
Whim of the Damned Lion, indeed. Pavek swore a string of templar oaths that widened the eyes of Quraiters. But the whim of the Lion-King was the best, the only, explanation he could offer his stunned guests, and even then, Pavek didn't tell them how or why the half-elf might have caught the mighty king's eye.
"He's young. Impulsive and reckless," one of the other druids said. "He'll be here waiting for us when we get back."
"And we'll never hear the end of it," another added.
Pavek raked his hair and stared at the sky. In his heart, he reminded himself that he was not the one to judge Hamanu of Urik and that one life measured against Hamanu's crimes and accomplishments was not terribly significant. It was merely that the life had belonged to a friend, and he'd thought another friend might respect it.