by Tanith Lee
A knock then, and, when I called for them to come in, a man entered in the livery of the Javhovor, and told me he begged my presence. It seemed strange, before they had always come to me, and yet it was a very polite summons. I followed the man, and was brought eventually to the great audience hall, its function virtually obsolete, but its splendor undimmed. Among the scarlet and green and white hangings, the pale-faced man, who was High-Lord, came to me, unmasked and bowed very low.
“Goddess, forgive my request that you come here, but I felt it was safer, perhaps.” A little pause, during which I noticed several courtiers and ministers around the walls. Behind me, the white fans of the princesses dipped nervously. “We have been forced,” the Javhovor began, and halted. “We thought it best,” he said. “A cruel decision. We have delivered ourselves to the mercy of our sister Cities, Anash and Eptor. There was no other path for us, goddess. I could not see my own die around me.”
I was angry with myself for falling into this trap, angry at the Javhovor for ensnaring me, angry with Mazlek that he had not sensed, and come in time after all.
“What have you done?” I asked—a blind speech enough, but he answered.
“The men of Belhannor will rise against the men of White Desert on the wall. It has been arranged.” He hung his head, gray and sick at the betrayal for which I did not even blame him.
“And I?” I said. “Where do I fit in this tapestry?”
“No insult will be offered you, goddess—I swear it.”
“I am delighted you are so confident. I do not share your optimism.”
There came a sudden, distant noise outside—shouts, cries, a roar of surprise and pain. No cannon uttered; there was no need. The men of Belhannor would be opening wide the gates now, welcoming their brothers inside, hopeful and a little nervous.
I sat my heaviness in a chair to wait, and noticed that the princesses slunk little by little away from me, to their father’s side. Soon there was a sound of booted feet, horses, many voices under the windows, before long, marchers rhythmic in the corridor outside, the doors and curtains thrust aside, and twenty men emptying into the hall. Mixed uniforms of purple and bright yellow, armor pieces, the visors of helms tipped back to show the arrogant masks of lions and bears—Anash, the mistress of the offensive. A man, a silver-masked soldier yet very proud, spiteful in triumph, swaggered into the hall—their commander, thinking himself their Javhovor.
A half nod to the High-Lord of Belhannor, a vicious little chuckle.
“Well. An intelligent move, brother.”
They might have been Vazkor’s words, but the voice was very light and high, oddly matched with the bulk of the man.
And then the insolent turning, the gaze taking in the length and breadth of the hall, coming to rest at last on me.
“And who is this, brother? Your lady, perhaps?”
He would know of me, know of the cat-faced goddess of Ezlann. She who had carried the enemy of Anash to his power.
“I am Uastis,” I said to the commander. “My husband is Vazkor, who would have plowed you and yours, deep in the river soil had he but time to spare.”
I said it to anger him, catch him off balance in this atmosphere of placatory groveling. His hand whipped to sword hilt, and I felt a laziness come on me, knowing what I could do, to him at least, and to his twenty, if I could summon hate enough. But after that, death would come, or the only form of death I could know. And abruptly I was afraid. How my enemies could play with me, endless games of agony.
There came a startling little cry, just beyond the door, a little thrusting and cursing because a man had fallen and pushed others as he fell. The Anash commander turned, and in that moment the doorway changed color and shape and was full of black-liveried men, some green-roped at the middle, all with the badge of a cat on the right side of the breast. Swift swords and men dropping before them. The floor was littered purple and yellow.
Two men ran to me—Slor and Mazlek.
“Goddess—quickly!”
I ran with them, not pausing to watch the amazement on those figures left alive behind us.
* * *
There were many corridors in the palace at Belhannor, and those we ran through were very empty. I had the impression that we were going downward, but had no time or breath to ask—that other in me made it hard for me to keep up. Then we turned out into a broad dark hall, and found a pack of the purple and yellow soldiers, plundering chests. Apparently anything that ran and did not wear their colors was fair game for them. At once swords were out, and they came rushing at us up the hall, yelling. Mazlek pulled me across their path, through a side door which was slammed behind us.
Fewer men with me now. Many had stayed on the far side of the door to hold off the pursuit. A sloping passageway ran down, followed by flights of dark stairways where wall torches struggled to remain alight. I stumbled many times.
In the damp darkness, we heard the great clang of the door bursting open above, and knew the hunt was on again.
“Not far,” Mazlek whispered. “A door soon they won’t be able to open.”
The steps narrowed and became a corridor without lights. Behind, the sounds were wild and raucous and savage. Slor came to a halt, and the rest of the men froze where they stood.
“We’ll hold them here,” he said, “a narrow place. By the time they can get past us, you will have got the goddess safe away.”
Mazlek hesitated a second, then he nodded. He reached out and clasped Slor’s shoulder hard in his hand, then he turned and pulled me on into the dark.
I was quite breathless by now, and hardly understood what was happening. It seemed only some awful part of my ordeal when my fingers met stone, and I found the corridor ended in a blank wall. I leaned on the cold pitted surface, gasping, and Mazlek thrust something into my hands.
“A cloak,” he said, “and a plain silk mask—iron gray, the color of the lower orders in Belhannor. Please put them on.”
I turned away and obeyed him, though I could not see how this would help us. When I looked back, I saw that he had donned a tunic of this stuff over his mail, and a plain mask also. I dropped the cat mask where he had dropped his own, and his badge and sash with it, but the open skull-cat eyes glared up at me, my own self left behind. A rasping sound made me jump back from the wall. A narrow oblong opening had appeared, framing blackness.
Mazlek held up one hand on which a ring curled I had not seen him wear before.
“I bought this key many days ago,” he said. “I thought it might prove useful.”
He guided me into the black mouth, followed me, then shut the way behind us.
“They may never see the door,” he said. “If they do, it will be useless to them without the ring.”
He grasped my arm firmly and we started forward. I could make out nothing at first, but then a greenish luminance began to ripple about us, and I smelled the river.
The light grew. I saw mud and mosses clinging on the walls. Bright green weeds strangled about our feet.
We came out of a small cave, like a rat’s bolt-hole, into the dull, white, faintly smoking day. The passage had opened on a low bank of the river, but not the river I had known from my windows. This was an oily trickle, clogged with weed growths and garbage. Rough steps led up from the mud to the narrow streets, peeling houses, and war ruins of the lower quarter.
8
The purple and yellow soldiery of Anash had filtered through into these streets, but by careful maneuvering we avoided a face-to-face collision with them. Despite their leader’s promises of brotherhood, they were breaking down the doors of perfume shops, clothiers and jewelers, and taking what they thought valuable. In an alley we passed a dog they had used for archery practice. Their noise was always with us—now distant, now dangerously close. Twice other men passed our hastily sought hiding places, in charcoal colors, marching. Eptor
, it seemed, were a more orderly crew.
Most of the house doors were locked tight and bolted from within. Many had fled, I think, at the last instant into the cellars and passages beneath their houses. Nearer the wall a whole street had been gutted by fire, still smoking, and a thick scattering of dead men lay there, some of whom I recognized; the last soldiers of Vazkor’s army.
Finally, a white stone house with a courtyard, the door of which was swinging on broken hinges. We went inside, and Mazlek dragged furniture from inner rooms to block the entrance. He would not let me help him. Once the barricade was in place, we went in and upstairs, and found narrow empty bedchambers. He made me lie on a bed, and pulled the covers over me.
“I will be outside your door,” he said, “if there’s trouble of any kind.”
“But, Mazlek,” I said, “how long do we stay here?”
“Not long. We must leave the city as soon as possible.”
“And then? Where?”
“White Desert,” he said.
I lay in the room but did not sleep, though I was very tired. Once there was a great commotion in the street, shouts and screams and crashes, but I was too exhausted to get up and look, and eventually the sounds died away. I spent a considerable amount of time reflecting, quite irrelevantly, on the fact that there seemed to be no hovels in the lower quarter. A City of palaces and houses, as I supposed Ezlann had been, as I supposed were all the Cities of the south—too proud to degenerate into slums, these bastard children of the Lost.
The colorless sky crept toward darkness.
Mazlek came in softly.
“I must leave you for a while, goddess,” he said. “Don’t move from this place, and light no lamps.”
I nodded, and he went. The night pressed close, very black, except that outside many separate little firelights sprang up, and flickered rose-red on the ceiling of the narrow room. The house began to creak and squeak ominously in the way of all houses when they have a solitary victim in them. I heard countless steps on the stairs, heavy, sly, cruel steps, soldiers with knives, whose way with pregnant women was too well-known to me from camp chat to leave me unmoved. But none of them were real, except the last. I sat up when I heard them, tense and very still, knowing this was no trick of the house. The door to the room swung open and a soldier of Anash stood there, the fire-glow picking out his livery, the bear mask, the stained knife stuck through his belt.
“Goddess,” said the soldier of Anash in Mazlek’s voice, “don’t be alarmed. I found this one on his own, and got these from him. It will be easy now. Most of them are drunk—drinking openly in the streets like animals. The gates will have sentries, no doubt, but as incapable as the rest, I think. There’s a horse in the courtyard.”
I followed him out of the house, and he mounted me behind him on a shaggy pack horse, a sturdy, squat, dark little beast, with more than a share of donkey; there was a glass wine bottle tied on the saddle. Mazlek unstoppered it, and poured half the red liquid onto the paving.
“When I tell you, goddess, you must act like a drunken woman, cling to me and laugh.” He sounded acutely embarrassed, and added: “Forgive me. I would not ask it of you if there were another way.”
“Oh. Mazlek,” I said reproachfully, “do you think me such a fool? Forget I am what you think I am because you killed me with your sword at the steading by the Water, and I healed, and followed you. If we are to make this journey together, you must understand I am nothing very special or particularly worth any trouble on your part. I will do what you tell me, and be grateful for your help.” It was a moment of weary truth for me, very bitter, yet oddly comforting too. If he was shocked by what I had said, he did not show it There was a moment’s silence, and then he spurred the horse and we were off.
The ride was swift, punctuated by dark alleys, by abstract patterns of firelight and figures outlined on that redness. Drunken men shouted at us, but had no particular inclination to follow. Away in the heart of the city there was a fierce orange glare among the palaces, and gouts of purple smoke. So much then for sisterly love restored. We reached a broad avenue and ahead, quite suddenly, the wall loomed behind houses. A lower gate this, not of great importance, therefore presumably sparsely manned. We passed a crowded bonfire in the street, and a missile struck the horse, which swerved, corrected itself, and ran on. Around a block of plundered shops, and stables where a few stray animals wandered, and the gate lay ahead.
“Now,” Mazlek said.
Even expecting his change of character, it was a surprise to me. He jerked on the horse’s reins abruptly, so that it protested and pranced, and he began to sway in the saddle, yelling some formless song without words or melody. He had untied the half-empty wine bottle, and now waved it aloft. I was so enthralled with his performance I almost forgot my own, but finally remembered, put my arms around him, and began to sing at the top of my voice one of the musical offerings of Darak’s camp, which might raise a few eyebrows, even here.
In this way we got to the gate-mouth, an entrance for drovers probably, judging from width and ugliness, and the amount of ancient animal droppings cemented to the road.
There were about ten men, more than I had hoped for, but unmasked, and with their store of bottles and wineskins about them, they were obviously not in their prime. I thought there might be some business with passwords which we did not know, but they had apparently forgotten all that.
“Halt!” The nearest one, who seemed to be in charge, came wavering toward us. “Halt, you drink-sodden son of a mare. Halt, halt, halt. What’s that up behind you?”
He did not speak in the elegant manner of the Cities, though in a corruption of the same tongue—a kind of army slang, almost a language on its own.
“A woman,” Mazlek said, and offered him the glass bottle.
The soldier drank, belched, and looked at me.
“Belhannese,” he said.
“That’s right,” Mazlek said, “and very willing to make me forget it.”
“Not much showing,” the soldier said, “but I’d say she’d got one in the pot.”
“That’s all right by me. She won’t be saying it’s mine, then, if we come here again, will she?”
The soldier put up a hand and began to explore me, and I felt Mazlek’s body stiffen. I gave him a little slap.
“Did I say you owned me, soldier?” I asked Mazlek. “Just because you gave me a ride? This is a nice man, I can tell.” I patted my besieger’s cheek, and the fool grinned. “We were going outside for a bit. Why not come with us?”
“Outside?” he queried, dubious. “Why not here and now?”
“I like to pick and choose,” I said, “and besides, do you want that riffraff pushing in before you?”
He glanced at the other men, grinned again, and walked to the front of the horse. As he led us out of the gate there were a few shouts, but he told them to be quiet, and they were, so that was no problem.
A little path ran down from the gate. The platform had degenerated into a slope here, loosely mantled with spring-pared trees.
“Here’ll do,” our escort said.
“Never mind him,” I said as I got down from the horse, nodding at Mazlek. I let the soldier pull me into some bushes, where he proceeded to get on with what interested him most. Mazlek was perhaps too quick, too angry, but the trained fighter in him saved us; he was also too professional to make a mess of things, for all his fury. He rose suddenly over us, palmed the man’s mouth, and thrust the knife into him. The Anashian died without a sound, and Mazlek dragged him off me, and flung him aside.
I could not see Mazlek’s expression behind the mask, but every line of his body expressed his horror.
“Goddess—I thought I had been too quick for him to—”
“Unimportant,” I said.
He shook his head and turned away.
We remounted the horse, and
rode quickly from the walls of Belhannor, through village fields, into the safe darkness.
* * *
We were lucky. An hour or so later, riding in the scrub woodland trailing from the foot of the hill, we found another horse, twin to the first, easily caught with a gift of sweet-grass. Mounted separately, we rode down at a trot, and made the dawn without a halt.
Belhannor was only a shape on the horizon now, an ivory figure from the game of Castles, with a smoke plume like a thundercloud still poised above her head. We made our stop in a copse of twisted thorn trees, and lit a small fire. Mazlek stripped off the things of Anash, and put on once more the soft iron-colored tunic and mask of a lower citizen. Now we were only Belhannese refugees, one pair out of hundreds probably, making for ruined Orash perhaps, until it was safe to go home.
Mazlek drew from the saddle pack a small box, and I could see from his unease what it must contain.
“Mazlek,” I said softly, “I can go for many days without food. You supply yourself as you want.”
He nodded, but slunk off among the trees to eat. He had not flinched at the bald statement, but, even so, the taboos of a lifetime could not be blown away so swiftly, if ever.
Later, we rode on, keeping a steady but unhurried speed. The land around me seemed quite unfamiliar—I had seen it last under snow, and through a fever haze. Nevertheless, it was a strange journey, this going backward over ground I had crossed before—the first time ever I had returned to any place which it took longer than a day to reach. Beneath the horses’ hooves the soil was now warmly brown, dappled with many greens. Dusk fell more slowly, and birds rang like bells at the dawn light. A fox’s lair among the bracken, and a vixen mottled white on her russet, still half in her winter coat.