by Sean Wallace
“And that other name she has – no, don’t say that one. I recall that one. And why she has it. It’s a good name, Coor Krahn. And you are a mighty Sword’s Man. Now, because of your skills, my lands stretch to the Black River. I’m grateful. The slave will bring your fee. It’s as we agreed.”
“I never doubted that,” said Coor Krahn. He bowed and turned his back upon Lord Juy. (They both understood he had referred not to a lord’s honor but to a Sword’s Man’s power and rights.)
A few minutes later a slave came, and presented the wallet of gold, crawling on his knees.
The Sun was high over the scaled towers of Juy’s mansion as Coor Krahn turned on to the road out of the valley.
The wallet was stowed in the leather pack across his back. No sane man in half a world would ever dare to try to steal it. Nor any of the ornaments a Sword’s Man wore, nor any piece of his armor or arms.
At Coor Krahn’s side, she hung from the belt of red leather in her scarlet silk scabbard. Although young still, he had walked so long, so many years, with that feel of her beside him, that to walk without her would have seemed like lameness. And in the same way, to sleep without her lying along his body and under his hand, like death.
“Sas-peth,” he murmured once, as he walked up from the glowing valley, “Sas-peth Satch.” But now he smiled, to himself, or to her. He often spoke a little to her, though he never spoke very much to other men, and to women, less.
* * *
Tonight he dreamed of her.
In the dreams he saw her in her spirit shape, which naturally was female. But also, in dreams, she put on flesh and blood. They were walking in a night garden, high on a roof above a city, perhaps Curhm-by-Ocean, or Is-lil in the north. Slender and dark, the sculptured trees rose from stone pots, and a stone lion, polished smooth as water, held the round orange Moon between his ears.
Coor Krahn could smell a perfume, like a spice, which in her woman shape the Sword had put on. Her hand rested lightly on his arm. Her face too was powdered pale, as the faces of aristocratic women always were. (Although in other dreams, when she strode or rode with him into battle, she was tawny as any peasant boy.) Her long hair looked smooth as the lion, as night water. She wore her color, as she always did, deep red, bordered with flame red. Her eyes were black as his own.
“Why are you up here, Lady Sas-peth?” he asked her courteously. He was unfailingly formal, when first addressing her, even when, as in some dreams they did, they lay down together.
“There is the sea,” she said, pointing her narrow finger away across the houses and the temples, to a curving line of fine white fire, which described waves breaking on the city stones. This was Curhm then, yet it had a look more of Gazul, which rose by a desert.
“Do you wish to go to the sea, Sas-peth?”
“No. Away from the coast.”
“Tell me then, where shall we go?”
Then she turned her narrow, perfect face and gazed at him. Her gaze was not like that of any woman he had ever met, high-born or lowly. Nor, for that matter, like the gaze of any man.
“At this time, I grow tired of our wandering about, Coor Krahn. Let us rest soon.”
In the dream he was startled. But she sometimes made him start. During the first dream in which she had bared her breasts and kissed him and drawn him down, he had been amazed, so amazed that it amounted to fear, until, presently, everything was lost in her.
“Then – then, lady, we’ll rest a while. Where would you wish our rest to be?”
“Some small place,” she said, idly now, more womanly. She glanced away, and smiled secretively, as sometimes she did before they coupled. But she drew her hand from his arm, and the long tail of her scarlet sleeve slipped over his wrist, cool as a snake. “The next small place, perhaps.”
“It will be some upland village . . .” he said, almost protesting.
She did not reprimand him.
Instead, she drifted off, crossing over the face of the Moon, moving away through the garden, until she vanished behind the trees.
He woke, disturbed slightly, and lay thinking of the memory of her, her shadow-silhouette against the face of the Moon.
But under his hand, she lay silent now, and steel hard, out of her scabbard.
“Whatever you wish, Sas-peth Satch. As always. I am your warrior, master of all but you. Your slave, Sas-peth.”
He had slept that night under the pines and sobe trees of a little wood, and in the morning, when he walked out of the wood, he could see nothing below but the track and the sloped shoulders of the hills. At once he felt relieved, and wondered at himself. In the past, now and then, she had come to him asleep and told him they must do certain things, take a certain direction or avoid another. So far as he knew, no loss had ever resulted from his obedience. Why should it? A Sword could only bring her warrior good; fame, wealth and kudos, through lawful battle, which was the reason for his life.
He walked on, along the hills, she at his side.
Coor Krahn had been born in a poor town, whose name meant Pigs City. Undoubtedly pigs were kept there, and provided the mainstay of the town’s economy. Coor Krahn grew up in a thatched house-hut, one of three belonging to the town’s overseer, and overlooking five courtyards, each full, like all the town courtyards, and the town streets, of pink and gray pigs.
When Coor was nine, some Sword’s Men entered the town. The overseer had himself called them, because Pigs City was experiencing conflict with a neighboring brigand across the river. (There had been trouble for months, and one night part of the town burned – Coor remembered well the cries and shrieks, the streaming metallic flames, and the odor of roast pork – that in later years he realized was not all attributable to unlucky pigs.)
Waiting on his father the overseer’s table, with several other older sons, Coor was dazzled and astonished by the four warriors, the Sword’s Men. They blazed in the greasy torchlight in their mail and ribbed plates of armor. These carapaces had been decorated with chasings and bosses of gold and silver so intricate they seemed embroidered there, while jewels blinked and gleamed like coals, or witch’s eyes of glacial ice. The men were tanned to bronze, their hair long, braided or worn tied high, as the tails of the horses they had brought. One had a scar across his cheek that pulled his face that side always into a grin. It was a wonderful scar, and he was rightly proud of it, sometimes fondling it, and he had given it a name: The Moon’s Tooth, which Coor never forgot, though afterward he forgot the names of all four men.
Their Swords also had names, and these names Coor forgot as well, but for perhaps another reason – they daunted him so. Slanting from the belts of their men, as the warriors sat at the overseer’s dinner, each Sword leaned in her scabbard of silk over leather over steel over velvet, and force swirled from them. The Swords were four queens, four enchantresses, and this was made most plain. A cup of hot wine was set before each Sword, which drink her Sword’s Man never touched, also a platter with a little of the best meat, and a flower laid on it, as if for a great lady.
Within a single day, the Sword’s Men had settled the brigand across the river. His head, and those of his two lieutenants, were fixed on poles by the wooden town gate, for everyone to delight in. The heads had not even quite rotted down to the skulls when Coor ran away from Pigs City and followed the road the Sword’s Men had taken, eastward, to Curhm.
He had seen the warriors paid in silver and gold coins, all the town could spare. It was not that which made him run after them. He knew they, and their kind, maintained the fabric of law and justice across the sphere of lands too great for him, then, ever to imagine. It was not that either. Coor was strong and healthy and bored almost to a stone with pigs, and of course the men, their magnificence, had impressed everyone. Nor was it that. It was the swirl of half-seen lightning, the presence, the essence of the four Swords, and of one in particular. He learned after this was not quite unheard of. The Sword had “flirted” with him, as an empress might, leading him on just
a short way, to bring him to awareness of his fate. She had been sheathed in jade silk. Not recollecting her outer name, he had yet some idea she was also called for something green, but that inner name her Sword’s Man had never revealed. Any more than Coor, when once he had become a Sword’s Man at the Sword-School of Curhm, would much reveal the inner name of Sas-peth Satch. For the inner name was given mostly at the first meeting, awake or in dream, after the man was wed to her. Only those you allowed to hire you, or were close to you in other ways, had a right to hear it. And then, generally, they – like Lord Juy – were too afraid to speak it aloud.
The Sword-School was harsh. It needed to be, to slough off quickly those who had mistaken their destiny. Some few died in their first months. Not many. Most simply failed and went home, or to other vocations. Sad, bitter even, but resigned. Only now and then one who failed killed himself. There was one of those during Coor’s second year. This boy, called Fengar, threw himself from the top of the Sun Wind Temple, and died on the pavement below, an offering to the wind goddess.
Coor had known, or believed he had known, he too would rather die than fail.
But he did not fail, he did extremely well. He rose straight, like a star, as if all of him, body, mind, and spirit, had already been honing itself, unsuspected, for this work.
At first his teachers were stern with him, zealous in case he should turn out only to be a star which burned up and fell. But after five years at the School, they were stern in another way, harsher if anything, to hammer him flawless.
From a yokel of the low lands, just able to scratch his name, he became educated and fined. He learned not only the arts of the warrior, but some of the knack of a scholar, able to read and to write, and of a courtier, who can speak and behave gracefully, unless provoked. No Sword’s Man ever had a wish to insult through ignorance, for any unwise enough to anger him he would be able to destroy. But these were material things.
In his seventeenth year, the mystery began to be taught him.
This was the mystery of the Sword, the core of the ethos of a Sword’s Man. Until reckoned ready, the apprentice owned no sword of any type. The blades he fought with and learned by were common property. But now the night approached when the School would give to Coor his own individual weapon. Not a sword, but a Sword. An artifact which had been forged for him alone, occultly, hidden from all but its makers. In other hands, it was not yet female, only he would wake it to its feminine life, and to its power.
At phases of the Moon, junctures of the zodiac, the concealed artisans of Curhm-by-Ocean created a Sword for Coor, as they, or their forebears, had done, through a thousand years, for every Sword’s Man of that School.
First came the ceremony that made Coor a warrior. Before it he was starved a month of food and sleep, and drawn by draughts of midnight herbs and tart, transparent smokes, into some other state, half from his body, which in turn seemed eccentric, wilder, and curiously less finite than he had ever known it. In this strange condition, he viewed eternity, the unimportance of everything else, and its contrasting utter necessity, for trivia held the seeds of different, higher matters, to be discovered only after death.
Thirty-one endless days and limitless nights Coor lived in this mode. On the evening of the thirty-second day, as stars dewed the twilight over Curhm, they led him to his wedding.
A Sword’s Man stayed celibate. That is, he was faithful only to his Sword. Although female, it was his phallus. Yet it – she – and only she – might make love to him. And her only might he ever take. She would lie at his side, in his arms, every night. And in dreams, if by his courage and his genius in combat he made her care for him, then she would give him pleasures no human woman ever could.
Coor, now named Coor Krahn, stood naked in the unlit dark of that huge granite chamber, and when they brought her to him, his steel mistress, without a scabbard, naked too, his sex rose hard, and he shook as if meeting at last his one true love.
He made his vows. In the luminous darkness, he thought he heard the Sword faintly singing at each resonance of his voice.
Then as he gazed at her, a hooded man was there, and as always he did, with exaggerated gentleness, lifting Coor Krahn’s left forearm, made a long thin cut in it with a virgin razor.
The blood ran out and dripped away and away, ruby beads, and finally they brought his Sword, to drink his blood, and as she drank, he kissed her, her silken skin of steel, for the first time.
When he did so, his erection faded and sank down. But he was appeased; as if he had reached a climax, and that energy was spent. While from the lessening of his flesh, vast vitality seemed to burst back through him. And in that moment, he knew the Sword’s inner name.
After the marriage, they took him to a couch, where he was to lie down and hold her, and sleep, and have the beginning dream.
The wine was drugged, and he slept instantly.
He found himself on a mountaintop, among the white, cold snow, under a sky glittering light, without color. But the Sword stood before him, and she was a woman, and clothed in red, and so he knew he had been right in the name. Touching his body lightly with pearl fingers just above the heart, the Sword spoke to him in her woman’s voice, while her beauty scorched him like the fiery sky.
“I am to be called Sas-peth Satch. Say my name.”
“Sas-peth . . . Sas-peth Satch, my lady.”
“My inner name you may also speak, since I informed you at our kiss, and you heard me.”
Then he said that name, and she nodded, and the dream was gone. After this he slept for a hundred hours.
Waking he remembered as they always did, and both the names. Sas-peth Satch was The Woman In Scarlet.
When it appeared, five days after she told him of it in the garden dream, the “small place” turned out to be attractive enough.
The hill itself was terraced for agriculture, and brilliant as if carved from emerald. There were fields, and yards of vines. A river, crystalline and thin in spots as a rope, threaded all through, and sallow willows hung over it, and then an orchard of ash-plums, and hyacinth trees.
The town was prosperous. Having reached the wide main street, which had been paved, he looked through to a second hill, and there was a lord’s mansion on it, with dragon-tinted roofs. Had the Sword brought him here for war? It seemed unlikely. Even the people on the street (who stared after him in the usual way) looked otherwise carefree.
Coor Krahn went to the inn. The slave by the door was well fed and went down on his knees, smiling, to welcome a guest.
The inn master saw to the care of a Sword’s Man personally. It was his pert wife, eyeing Coor Krahn in a fashion he knew quite well, who said to him, “And why can you be here, a great Sword’s Man, in our peaceful little pond?”
“I’m on my way somewhere,” he answered. When she tried to improve on this, he did not reply, and sat as if thinking, until she left him alone.
The day passed with sunlight and the mooing of cows in the water-meadows. As evening stole through, Coor Krahn heard the inn filling up below, and kept to his chamber. They would be discussing him sufficiently as it was.
Lanterns lit in the courtyard. Moths danced. Cool breezes blew the veils of night, and a firefly winked on and off by the well.
He was restless. He did not know why he was here. Did she mean him to stay here for sure; as she had said to rest here, and as the inn slut had said, in this peaceful little pond? He was young, not yet thirty. Sufficient time for restful dawdling in a decade or so.
“Why have you sent me here, Sas-peth?” he asked her softly, as she went up and down with him across the room. “Why must I loiter? Do you aspire to loiter – to rest – you? Or were you only playing a game with me?”
He thought, if he slept, he might dream of her and then she would tell him why, or what she really wanted. Or even that she had been testing him, his loyalty to her that she had never, in any case, doubted. And that tomorrow they would go on, away from here.
But
when he fell asleep it was late. The youthful Moon had sailed over, and the town was silent as a grave. And he only dreamed, incredibly, as he seldom did, that he was once more living in Pigs City. The change was, in this dream, he was a man full grown, yet not a warrior. He was the overseer, since his father and the other sons were all dead. He was sitting in a courtyard, with pigs everywhere, seeing to a judgment of some errant wife. She looked, of course, exactly like the pert wife of the inn master, who had tried to interest him earlier.
When he woke, dawn was ahead of him, the sky beyond the window like a peach. He caressed the steel skin under his hand, his wedded wife, the Sword.
“Perhaps, lady, I need some sign from you. Pardon my asking it of you. But I’m foxed. I don’t understand. Perhaps give me some sign today, why it is you truly want to remain in this small place. Have I mistaken it? Was it some other town you had in mind? Guide me, Sas-peth Satch. Or maybe I’ll have to go on anyway, a little distance, to make sure I didn’t mistake your meaning.”
When he said this, a shudder went over him. The dawn was cold, despite its flush, and he had thrown off the blanket. But it was not because of that. He felt his words had been dismissive, a threat that he would have his own way in spite of what the Sword wished. And that could never, must never be.
“Whatever you want, lady,” he said.
As he got up, his limbs seemed stiff. For a second he caught sight of the ghost of some man’s old age. But Coor Krahn was young, and in a moment was as he had been. He put himself, his character, on again, like his clothes.
But buckling on the belt of the Sword, for the first time in his life, it slipped through his fingers. He caught the scabbard before it met the ground. The Sword had not been in the scabbard, or the omen would have perturbed him more.
At noon, an elaborately dressed servant was waiting for him downstairs.
“From my master, I bring you greetings, Sword’s Man. And this modest trinket.”