by Anne Perry
“I wonder what they have for us this time,” one of them said dreamily.
“Fruit, I expect,” the second answered. “Or honey.”
“More like hides.” The third pursed his lips thoughtfully. “That very soft leather that feels almost like heavy silk.”
Questions poured through Sardriel’s mind, relentless logic, and he looked at the old men’s faces and saw bland pleasure, contentment. The fire and the passion were gone, the capacity for hunger or pain, indignation or the driving need to believe.
He left them and walked away, back along the shore. Were they paralysed with fear? Were there hostages held somewhere? Why was no one fighting? Why could he not even sense anger in the air, or desperation, even hate? No one cared! It was as if he were the only person who could see what had happened. He was in his own land, among his own people, and he had never been so alone.
Where could he turn for an ally? Farramon was blind, like a man overtaken by madness. The master who had brought him would not be back for days. Sardriel stared around him at the bright water whispering against the piers and curling over on to the sand by the shore, crunching on the shingle. He looked up the narrow streets where more nets were hung to dry like black lace against the pale walls of the houses. Was there anyone else in Orimiasse who was awake to the ruin, or was this his own private descent into nightmare?
One decision became more and more inevitable as he thought about it. He must find Siriom and face him. It was fourteen years since they had parted in Kyeelan-Iss. They had known each other only a month, yet in that time they had marked each other’s lives for ever. Each had dealt the other a wound that would not heal. Without seeking it, Sardriel had won the only thing Siriom wanted and could not buy with any art or price on earth, the love of his wife, Elessar. She had been coerced into marriage, profoundly against her will, to save her people from invasion by the strongest forces of Kyeelan-Iss. For their sakes she was obedient to Siriom in his hall and at his table, but she would not submit to his bed.
When Sardriel, new to Sadokhar’s court, had gone as emissary to try to win alliance between the two kings, in spite of all their will against it, he and Elessar had fallen in love. Siriom had seen it in their eyes, their faces, even the echoing movement of their bodies, and jealousy stormed through him until it consumed the last shred of honour left. He used lies and deceit to manipulate them to one place at the same time, and appear to be adulterers. He was King, Sardriel was his guest. To have abused hospitality in such a way was treason and a crime unto death.
He told Sardriel that if he rode away in peace and never returned then Elessar would live. Of course he accepted.
He told Elessar that if she came willingly to his bed, as often as he should wish, and filled his every desire, then Sardriel would live. In agony of revulsion she too accepted. But the misery of it broke her health, and two years later she died in childbirth, and her baby with her. It was only then that Sardriel learned the price she had paid for his life, and the grief had changed him for ever.
Now he must think of the present and see what manner of creature Siriom had become, how good or evil had altered him.
It was evening when he finally walked up the steep street, between the walls of the houses, softly coloured with the reflection of sunset. Above him the remnants of the once delicate nets were strung across from window to window. No one had worked on the snags and tears, or taken out the broken pieces of weed. A few doors were open, but only from one did he see the flicker of firelight, and from none of them was there music. He could hear it in his mind, not the lutes and low, throaty pipes of the Lost Lands, but the rippling harp of Kyeelan-Iss that Elessar had played.
He let its beauty soothe and hurt him, wakening old dreams that lay crushed in his heart, and allow himself to feel, and the pain of it washed through him until he reached the Prince’s House.
There were guards on duty, but they made no demur about letting him in. The iron fretwork gates closed behind him and he went on up the steps and through the archway inside. He imagined Siriom would be in the Great Hall with its long windows that looked towards the twilight over the sea. He was not mistaken.
The doors were open but there was no sound from within. He assumed Siriom was alone, but even before he saw the figure of the King of Kyeelan-Iss in the carved chair, deliberately reclining, he was aware of another person. His eyes were drawn to him in spite of the power and the enmity of Siriom, and all that lay between them.
The other presence was the dwarf, broad-shouldered, squat and immensely heavy. His weight seemed to bear down as if his flat, archless feet must leave an imprint even on the stone flags of the floor. He was dressed in a curious tunic of diamond-shaped panes of different shades of gold, and it seemed never to be quite still because he was endlessly moving his stubby, white hands. His eyes were not human, but liquid yellow and goatlike.
He smiled as he saw Sardriel, and his tongue wet his lips.
It cost Sardriel an effort to tear his gaze away and look at Siriom instead. He felt an oppression in the room like damp on his skin and the air clogged his lungs. Speaking was so difficult that for a moment he did not, and it was Siriom who broke the silence.
“Is that you, Sardriel of the Lost Lands?” He leaned forward a little, peering, although there was plenty of light. His lips puckered in a grimace of satisfaction. “I knew you’d come. Wherever you were in the world, you’d hear of this sooner or later.” His voice was low in his throat, without timbre, thin for so heavy a man. He had grown pot-bellied with time. His face was pasty-white and his black hair sparse so his scalp showed through. But it was his eyes that held Sardriel’s attention. They were opaque, clouded over. His head moved, questioning, searching for the smallest sound of movement or breath so he could place Sardriel in the room.
“I’m here, Siriom!” Sardriel responded grimly. “In front of you! And yes, I came when I heard. It’s a poor kingdom you hold. What wealth is it to you when the people are idle and neither toil nor serve? What kind of fool breaks the thing he has stolen?”
Siriom faced the sound of Sardriel’s voice, placing him exactly. His hands grasped the arms of his chair, his body tense. “The kind who remembers old injuries, and repays them tenfold!” he hissed. “I don’t want your wretched islands to take their prosperity! I want them ruined. I want you to watch your people blunder around in the darkness and fall to their knees, idle and deluded, grasping dust for treasure. And I have it! Look around you and see that I do! Taste it! Smell it in the air! Know it in your soul, Sardriel!”
The acrid odour of hatred was so sharp in the room it burned the eyes. The years of jealousy had piled deep; the knowledge that Ellesar had despised him, and now was beyond his reach to win, or to hurt, had corroded all that was left of him. Sardriel knew who had given him his wish. He turned to the dwarf. This was Azrub, Lord of Delusion, who had come through the portal of hell with Tiyo-Mah.
Looking now at his face, with its lustre of pleasure, Sardriel was repulsed in a way he had never felt before, as if something filthy had touched his body and crawled inside him. He must break it. He must never allow this abomination to know his heart.
He turned away, looking again at Siriom. He wanted to tell him that this was only the middle of the war, not the end, but he had no words to convey to this wreck of a man that truth was a clean and beautiful thing which no amount of lies could tarnish, no matter who believed them. Above all, Siriom’s victory was a mirage which he saw because he wanted to, a reflection of no more substance than those created by Azrub.
But Siriom had forgotten what truth was and he no longer understood the words.
Sardriel knew he would be wasting his thought, and he turned away again, leaving without further speech. He must plan how to begin the struggle to tear the illusion from his people and bring them back into the pain and the joy of life. They must begin to fight their bondage before it wound so deep around them, into their flesh, that they no longer had any strength left.
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It took him many days to find anyone with whom he might begin. Everywhere he went it was the same. Men and women drifted in idleness, staring at the untended fields, smiling vacuously as if they saw beauty and meaning where there were only boats riding at anchor, torn nets, weeds growing in the rich earth choking the crops, animals wandering from one pasture to another untended.
No one knew what any individual saw with the eyes, of their dreams, except Azrub, because it was he who had woven the delusion which bound them.
Sardriel watched and listened. He struck up conversation with one person after another, always probing, seeking for some spark he could reach to ignite a fire of reality. He was on the beach with the tide racing in, surf white at the blue edge of it, salt sharp on the wind, when he saw a young man with a piece of driftwood in one hand and a knife in the other. He kept staring at the half-finished work as if uncertain what more to do with it. It had a kind of beauty, like the flight of a bird, and yet the wings were incomplete.
“The wood has a character in it,” Sardriel said, looking at it more closely. “If you go against it, it will break and become meaningless. What is your name?”
“Helik,” the young man answered, struggling for comprehension as he stared at the wood again. “You see a pattern, a form?” he asked.
“Yes ... don’t you?” Sardriel watched him closely. What had Azrub caused him to see in the bone-white branch in his hands? Was it the wood any more, or some precious artefact from the fabric of his dreams?
“I thought to be a great artist, once,” Helik said quietly. “In stone ... in marble, or some such. Perhaps rock crystal, or quartz. It is strange now that I can do it.” He held up the wood for Sardriel to admire. “I cannot remember how I learned. Isn’t that odd?”
“Memory is hard to explain.” Sardriel stood beside him on the sand. “I heard a story once, from a traveller on the other side of the world.” As they walked up the slope to the dunes he began to repeat to him the tales that a poet he met on the long journey alone across the steppes had told him of the ancestors of the Irria-Kanders. They had thought themselves gods, and forgotten the fragility of the balance between life and death. Nearer the sea they sat down, sheltered from the wind where the scent of lupins was heavy in the sun.
Sardriel told stories of deceit, and how men had wasted their substance in pursuit of that which had no value.
The light faded and the air grew cold. Sardriel was aware of it but Helik was still imprisoned in the world created by Azrub’s art. The rising tide washing high just beyond the dunes, loud in their ears in the gathering darkness, did not reach through the golden walls of deceit.
Sardriel picked up the piece of driftwood which had fallen where Helik’s hands had let it slip.
“What is it?” he asked.
“This?” Helik noticed it again and. frowned. “Rose quartz. I was going to carve a bird in it, but it is very hard. I’m afraid I’ll shatter it.”
“Where did you find it?”
“Here, in the sand.”
“Rose quartz ... in the sand?” Sardriel said doubtfully.
Helik turned it over and over in his fingers, touching the wood’s grained surface where the water had eroded it. He frowned.
“Does it feel like quartz?” Sardriel asked.
Helik held it out. “What do you think it is?”
Sardriel took it gently, hesitating for some time. The air had the strange, luminous quality of twilight over the water, the fiery, reflected glow from beyond the horizon. “I think it looks like rose quartz,” he replied very quietly. “But it feels like driftwood. And it is important to know the truth, because the grain of wood is nothing like the crystals of quartz. If one were to try to make form in it, supposing it to be wood, and it were crystal, it would shatter.”
Helik concentrated fiercely, drawing his brows together, running his fingers over the surface again and again, feeling the grain, the denseness of the knots, the bare smoothness of the branch where the water had polished it.
Sardriel waited. Would the stories he had told jolt some fragment of Lost Lands discipline and belief too deep for even Azrub to mask forever?
He was afraid Helik was slipping away from him. Would he break the concentration if he spoke?
“Is it warm?” he said impulsively. “Like a living thing, or cold, like mineral of the earth?”
Helik looked up at him. “What are you trying to make me see?” The words were charged with emotion. His fingers were clenched on the wood, knuckles white. “Who are you? What is it you want here?”
If Sardriel were to speak now, and say the wrong thing, he would have to begin again with someone else, and he felt time pressing hard upon him as Azrub’s hold tightened.
“I am a Lost Lander returning from abroad,” he replied. “And what I want is to know more clearly than I do what it is that I see or touch. If I don’t, I may be injured, and so may those I care for.”
“Injured?” Helik repeated the word, still turning the wood over and over in his hands. “I haven’t felt pain in days ... weeks, actually.”
“That is the purpose of the story of the Irria-Kanders,” Sardriel explained. “They realised what mistakes they had made only when it was too late, and they had already changed too far to go back.”
“Really?” Helik frowned, trying to read in Sardriel’s eyes the spirit beyond the words. He smoothed his fingers over the driftwood wing. “What is it you see?”
“Wood,” Sardriel replied. “Bone-pale, wind and sand-polished wood, cast up by the sea. It is as beautiful as rose quartz, but that is not what it is.”
Helik lifted his eyes very slowly to Sardriel’s face. “You are right ... it is wood. I can see that now.” He stared around him. The last echo of daylight high in the sky showed the empty, marble-pale sand, one boat pulled above the tide, its net spread across the bow end and left trailing “Where is everyone?” he asked, puzzled.
“Gone home,” Sardriel answered.
“Home? Then why haven’t they taken the net?” Helik asked with disgust. “It’s torn. No fisherman would leave it like that!”
“He can’t see the holes in it,” Sardriel replied.
Helik looked not at the net, but at Sardriel. “They’re gaping.”
“I know.”
Helik did not question it. Something within him already knew. He turned and looked towards the hill as if he could see the town beyond, and Sardriel understood the slow clarifying of the vision inside his mind but he could only guess how much it hurt.
The following morning the light was bright and hard, and the wind came in cold off the sea. It was choppy, white-capped, but not a day on which a mariner would fail to put out. Yet Helik was the only one to be down by the wharf ready to sail. Sardriel stood a little apart from him as his friends stared with incomprehension.
“What are you doing?” the oldest asked, a man with grey streaks in his hair.
“Going fishing,” Helik replied. “If you mended your nets instead of leaving them spread out like that, you could come too. It’ll be good fishing today to the north.”
“We don’t need any more fish,” the man replied patiently. “It’s foolish and wasteful to catch what you can’t use.”
“We have no fish,” Helik replied. “There’s only grain, and not much of that.”
“The silo’s full of grain!” one of the other men said in amazement. “And there’s enough fish in the ice house to feed us for a week!”
“The silo’s nearly empty,” Helik said tartly. “And there’s nothing but ice in the ice house. Look at it again.”
There was now a group around him, half a dozen or more, and their faces reflected dismay turning into anger.
“This is not like you, Helik,” one said calmly. “Why are you being so contentious?”
“Why can’t you be grateful for the plenty we have now?” another asked, shaking his head. “The only thing we haven’t got in the Lost Lands is a warm shore to grow fruit!” He laug
hed. “That’s about the only dream left that hasn’t come true!”
“Dreams!” Helik said sharply. “That’s all they are. Can’t you see that? I don’t know how it could all rot so far in a few days—or weeks—but it has. Look around you!” His voice was rising higher with anger and an edge of fear. He swung his arm wide, gesturing towards the harbour where no sails were lifted, no ships loaded or unloaded. Men and women sat around talking to each other, laughing. They did not even seem to feel the chill of the wind off the water.
The oldest man frowned. “Pull yourself together, Helik! You are speaking irresponsibly. It’s not like you to criticise your fellows. You had best go out on your own, if you are still bent on putting to sea. Taste the wind and the water a little. Think hard on your ways, and come back to us with a better heart. Be grateful for the plenty we have. Siriom has brought us many gifts. He is welcome to stay as long as he will. We have plenty—are we to begrudge him a few days’ hospitality?”
“He’s been here more than a few days!” Helik argued. “It’s been ...” But as he strove to remember how long, the truth eluded him.
The others were looking at him with anger.
Sardriel waited. Should he intervene or would that only make it worse? What could he offer Helik that would take the place of friends—and make standing alone bearable? Nothing ... and he knew it.
Slowly Helik turned from one of the men to another, then looked beyond to the harbour. The fight for decision was naked in his face.
“Siriom brought us nothing,” he said at last, “except confusion, a disease of idleness as if we can’t even see what’s in front of us! When did you last do any work—put to sea, fish, mend nets, plant or weed or gather crops?” He turned to Sardriel for support.