by Tanith Lee
Only torches twined now in the dance of fire.
Panduv turned. Like two spiders, the nurse-woman, and her daughter, were weaving a web of beads.
“Be wary, nurse.” Panduv was harsh. “I’ll leave her with you until sunset. Remember your duty to the Master’s child.”
Infallible words.
The child laughed again, seeing her mother desert her.
• • •
In point of fact, Panduv got no farther than the market place.
Tomorrow was a holy day, the festival of Cah the Giver. (Arud had set off for the temple at sunrise and would not leave its precincts until tomorrow’s midnight. Another motive for Panduv’s restlessness; when he was in the house, at least he was a cause of occupation.)
By temple law, all buying and selling must cease before this evening’s sun went down, and the market was a madhouse.
After a negligent try or two, Arud’s chariot driver stalled the vehicle at a herd of orynx. The hiddrax stood trembling.
Panduv would have wished to call the man a fool and cuff him.
Instead, “Master,” she remarked, in tones of burnt honey, “Arud’s animals are distressed. Please do turn into that side street there.”
“Impossible, woman,” said the driver. In her instance, “woman” was title rather than dismissal, uttered quite deferentially. Panduv gritted her teeth, waited. “See, the pigs’re almost past.”
And past the orynx continued, thumping with their bristly sides the wheels and left flanks of the unhappy team, while men leered and grinned at the Black One, and mere women scurried by like ticks across a dog.
Superfluous to protest. Emblem of everything now. She had accepted. Like the ageless fire-sorceress in the mountains, Thioo . . . Nothing matters. Here we are. Here, it’s the custom. A Lowlander philosophy: We have all time and in time anything can be accomplished. The waste of one small life is nothing.
Why think of such things? Life was radiant and absolute.
But maybe it would be more comfortable to accede. Not only in her outward values, but through and through. What then? Eat confectionery, render to Arud a tribe of male brats, grow lush and portly—
Panduv surfaced as if from under a river, returning gasping into the scalding heat and the market noise.
Across the humps of jostling pigs, a rabble of drovers, the sweetmakers’ booths and the towering jars of the sugar-sellers, Panduv saw into the enclosure of the slave-market. The fence was scanty, a rope run round between posts. On to the auction block had been pushed a gang of five men, wrist-chained together. They were all but naked in five skins of metallic darkness foreign to Iscah. On this dark, appalling scars and lacerations indicated their former employment. They were off a slave-galley, men of abnormal strengths, but actually useless in terms of service. It was well-known, they could be bent to nothing else having outlasted the oar and the whip of an oars master. The fifth man was the Lydian. Rehger.
The floor of the chariot seemed to evaporate and leave her adrift in the air. Even as this happened to her, reason grasped her firmly and set her down again on a solid surface. No, it was not Rehger, not Saardsinmey and living life. No.
Yet, if not Rehger, a man so like him—
Though lean and muscular—how else would he have survived?—he did not have the distinctive build of the professional Swordsman, a Son of Daigoth. This man, too, was older than Rehger would have been, had he lived. But handsome, and in manner off-hand, princely almost, divorced from the chain and the company. He stood and looked about, while the other four crouched snarling.
“There,” said Panduv to her driver. “Lord Arud lacks a bodyguard.”
“No, woman,” said the driver, slightly offended and reproachful—she had forgotten in her desire to joy her lord her proper address of master. “No good. Those are off some Zakr pirate the Vardians trounced. Such muck can only be put in the mines.”
Panduv braced herself.
“Master, your leave to tell you. Lord Arud has said to look out for such a slave.”
Dismissing female stupidity, the driver did not respond. While, from the auction, Panduv could hear the other men saying much the same as he had. Certain of the capital’s priestly factions held a stake in mining concerns of Shansarian Alisaar. Presently there would come a bid of this sort.
Even though a mirage, it was imperative to save him.
Panduv left the chariot. Her driver gawped at her. Women did not behave in this way. Only the lowest went about here on foot and unescorted. Leopard-black, veil-less, slender and upright, Panduv stalked upon the enclosure, stepped over the rope and trod forbidden ground.
Outrage was immediate, but tended more to ridicule than brutality. In the silence which succeeded the oaths and sneers, Panduv approached the auction block. The men made way, affronted beyond words. The auctioneer was stone.
“Your pardon, master,” said Panduv, head lifted and eyes cast down. “It is the business of my Lord Arud the Priest, the Adorer of Can.”
Someone yelled, “Yes, we know who keeps this black bitch.”
But the auctioneer, a traveled fellow, aware that times and etiquette might change, prudently murmured, “What then?”
Panduv whispered in turn, “He would buy that fifth man. Keep him for Lord Arud. Money shall be sent inside the hour. Don’t fail. You’ll make a profit.”
The auctioneer drew a long breath. “All right. Now for the sake of Cah, get out, out!”
Panduv, on the first occasion in her years at Iscah, drew up a corner of her gauzy sleeve, and masked her face. She crept away through the crowd of masculine essence, making tiny moans and sighs, to appease it. As she went, she felt the astonished stare of the fifth slave going after her, molten or icy on her spine. She was not sure which.
• • •
When they had fed him, they de-loused, scraped and bathed him, washed and trimmed his hair, shaved his face, salved and bound an open wound or two, dressed him in the linen garment of a house-servant, and sent him up the stairs.
In a blue chamber that gave on a terrace, the gorgeous black girl from the market sat in a chair and looked at him.
He presented her with a bow straight from some court of the Middle Lands. He sensed she might care for it and be amused.
“Your kindness, lady,” he said, “is beyond thanks. But you took a risk. Didn’t they warn you, my type absconds, or murders his owners inside two days.”
“The ship was a pirate,” she said. “They caught you somewhere.”
“No, I was legitimately sold to them, bartered, more correctly. By a friend of mine.”
“And before you were a galley slave, what were you then?”
“A free man. And sometime agent of Dorthar. By birth? A Lan, with connections to the royal line there. My name’s Yennef.”
“Yennez,” she said. Then, crisply, throwing off the slur, “Yennef.”
He smiled. His teeth were white. All of him seemed sound and vital. But his eyes were luminous and curiously dreamy, rather as Rehger’s eyes had been. Groomed, he looked more like Rehger than ever. It was bizarre.
“We’re strangers then, lady, in an alien land. Is that why you had compassion for me?”
She did not intend to tell him why. To him it would mean nothing, and for herself, she did not want to chatter of it.
“My lordly master,” she said, “has need of a bodyguard.”
Yennef grinned. “You find me suitable.”
“On reflection, not. It would be better, I think, to manumit you and let you go.”
The grin fell from his face They gazed each other out. It was fine to have before her a man prepared to do this, eye for eye.
“Why?” he said. Then, remembering Iscah, “You paid your lord’s cash for me. What will he say?”
Recklessly she answered, “It’s a feast of Cah. Gift
s are exchanged, sometimes they free slaves and prisoners. I’ll tell him this was an offering on his behalf. He’s a priest. It will look pious, and also display that he’s rich.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “He’ll have your silky hide.”
“Oh, no” she repeated. She said, without pride, “I can usually make him do what I want.”
Yennef considered. He said, “But you still look made of silk.”
She stared back.
“If you need a woman,” she said, “I’ve no objections to your having one of the kitchen girls, before you leave.”
“Those little rounded wobbly stuffed cushions? That will be nice.”
Panduv said, briskly, “I’ve already sent for the clerk. The deed of manumission will need to be written and sealed quickly. At sunset all business stops, for the festival.”
“And you have use of his seal, as of his coffers, this malleable master of yours.”
“The Lord Arud is sometimes away at the temple two or three days together. I regulate his house.”
“And after the clerk, what?”
“You’ll be given provisions and set on your road.”
He said, “I’ve forgotten which road that was.”
Suddenly the attractive nonchalance and swagger went from him. His broad shoulders bowed and he hung his head. For an instant a look of bitterness and frustrated gnawing grief got hold of his face. Then these, too, seemed to drain out of him, as if he no longer had the stamina to affect them. She recalled, he was older than Rehger, almost twice his years, maybe, and had been cooped for six months or more on a Zakorian pirate galley.
“Sit there,” she said, and when he had done so, she brought him wine and served him, as if he were a master of Iscah and she a dutiful woman.
A minute later (they had not spoken any more, except that, unIscaian, he thanked her again), the clerk was sent in with his papers and case of ink and wax.
Panduv was sorry. She was more sorry than was comfortable at the swift curtailment of this interlude.
• • •
He had lost all track of time, nearly of all things, on the galley. That was normal. To survive, less so. It was Galutiyh the Dortharian who had rendered him to the pirates. Yennef had not been thrown from the trail of Galut and his dross, and of Yennef s son riding with them. Yennef had sensed the false leads in Xarabiss, but not been able to get over the water in proper order to keep up. That was luck proving flighty, as it always had. Then a series of mishaps occurred on the way to Zaddath—which was where he knew, by then, they must be heading. Some of the delays might have been fashioned by Galutiyh—lame mounts, felled trees, obliterated paths. Or not, depending on the dedication of ill-fortune. Then again, maybe it was only bloody Anackire, working out her scheme-dream of the world.
Galutiyh’s men ambushed Yennef in the rough country around Ilva. Galutiyh had his score to settle. There were beatings and other games. In the end, dizzy and carefree from swamp fever, Yennef beheld himself, from some distance up in the air, being traded to black men with smashed faces, whose long low ship flew a tattered doubled-moon and dragon. They were not far from old Hanassor, one gathered from the talk. Free Zakorian reavers. He gave himself over as done for.
He had already, somewhere or other, apologized to Rehger for non-utility. Well, his son would expect nothing of him. His son. In the gut of the stinking black galley, Yennef had visions of Rehger—torn apart on a machine of torture, poling upriver between mountains, in a jungle, a king in a chariot riding to war, standing among white towers of marble.
Finally, Yennef believed that Rehger was dead, and believing it, most of the anguish dimmed. How could you mourn and rage over something to which you had no rights? Besides, it might all have turned out otherwise. Yennef, condemned to die in the pit of the galley, need not trouble.
But nourished on the gangrenous meat and verminous bread-slabs and diseased water, rowing in the boiling ship belly, men perishing around him, endlessly cut by fire—the tongues of whips—expecting always no tomorrow, his fever abated or was amalgamated into him, and Yennef lived. And then came a night of furious rowing, the Zakor seeking to evade a Vardian patrol with a Shansarian captain out of Sh’alis, sea-wise and angry. Chased up the lawless coast almost into Hanassor’s rocky cliffs, the Zakorians discovered themselves trapped between their pursuer and another waiting Vardian. The pirate was rammed.
As she was sinking, blond men came down into the howling hell of the rowers’ deck and broke the shackles.
It transpired Yennef was now the property of Vardians. They knew him for a Lan, but were not overwhelmed by former ties of friendship. They shipped him across to Iscah in the intestines of a merchant vessel, not rowing, simply bolted fast to the planks. From the port, his gang and a couple of others were marched to the capital. They were not worth much, and the mix now in charge of them had no patience. When men died they were tossed off the road into ditches. This was Iscah. And there were plenty of crows.
Gaining the market, Yennef was cheerful. He had gone by most other emotions, save contempt—of self and every other.
He knew of Cah—of course, his past had taught him, a million years before, in a mountain hovel in the snow. And all at once there Cah was, gliding through the slave-auction. Crow-black herself, wand-slim in her gauzes, with a silver wristlet and necklaces of ivory.
And Cah spoke to the auctioneer and Cah brought Yennef to this house on the hill. Cah, quite properly, was the lover of a high priest and would make the man do what she choose. Cah had let Yennef free. In her presence then, the backbone of indifference crumbled.
• • •
The Lan was not wholly sane, she saw that now. It was not a rowdy or pernicious madness, gentle, rather. Perhaps it would subside. But the cause seemed deeper, older than the reavers’ ship.
Best, would be to send him out in the early morning, before the sun rose on Cah’s festival. He could bribe the city gate, and Arud’s seal would settle any argument. She could not give Yennef a mount, but with the provided coins doubtless he could come on one. She believed what he had said, about the Lannic royal line. Rehger had had this princely look about him, too. She could have supposed them related, the Lan, the Lydian, but Rehger had been birthed from a witch girl and an itinerant in the jumble of the Iscaian mountains.
The business with the clerk was slowly got through, in Arud’s name. In law no woman could do anything, and the clerk, seen to with a double fee, conducted the affair as if an invisible Arud were at his elbow. When everything was accomplished, Panduv sent the Lan to one of the guest cells that opened on the altar-court. It was a ridiculous excess of hospitality, as buying and freeing him had been. This did not seem important, nor Arud’s reaction to the news, which she could hardly deny him, seeing the legalities were for public record, and meanwhile the entire house was primed.
Arud’s return (tomorrow’s midnight, drunken and slack from the temple mysteries which involved both blood sacrifice and carnal orgy), felt far off, as if to be located in another decade.
She had given instructions to the villa servants concerning the man Yennef’s comfort. At the correct hour, one of the boys should go to rouse him for departure.
Panduv crossed to her apartment, to see Teis put to bed. The sun was a red ball rolled almost all the way down the hill, and by its flushed glow the child lay on her mat giggling, as the nurse told her stories and tickled her. Panduv’s presence was noted by both and dismissed. Panduv stayed only a minute in the room.
She paced the roof terrace until the sun set. A religious stillness had descended on the city so that she heard a night bird begin to sing in a garden at the foot of the hill. The stars were sown. The evening was beautiful. The black woman stood high up in the sky on the priest’s roof, yearning for things forgotten or never known, until the breeze blew cold. She chided herself then, and went in again to the house.
• • •
There was a spring star which, a while before midnight, shone in through an upper window.
It woke Panduv, pointing down between her eyes. Or she thought it did.
She was aware immediately of a presence in the chamber, and stiffened, imagining snakes. But then it came to her the intrusion was not physical. Nothing was to be seen, or heard, yet, as if a voice had spoken in her head, she received the phrase: Go offer to Cah.
She was rebellious. Who tells me so?
In that moment she woke in earnest.
The apartment was undisturbed and silent and void, but for the dry chirrup of the cricket which dwelled behind the hearth stone.
Presently Panduv got up and drew on her mantle. She covered herself only with that. Leaving the bedchamber, she walked out into the passage, barefoot—
Starlit air hung from the window-places. At the corridor’s end, a flight of steps led into the altar-court.
On the house altar of Cah, freshly scrubbed and spilled with an aromatic, a dish of oil had been left burning for the festival. The drowsy flickering light showed only the lumpen stone of the goddess, faceless, and breastless, even. Yet it had been awarded a crown of flowers.
In her mind’s eye, Panduv saw herself, a dancer in a garland. She saw the Lydian wreathed after combat’s victory.
Although she was now awake, at least in part, another question welled through her, words she did not even understand. You want your hero’s glory back again? And, like the question not understood, a reply, Only to live.
The court, open to heaven, let starlight, too, in at the doorway of the guest’s cell.
He lay alone, motionless, but awake, she knew. He also had had his training. He could kill empty-handed if he judged her some thief or mischief-meddler.
“Hush,” she whispered, to let him recall her voice.
Then she heard him laugh, very low.
