by Tanith Lee
“Yes, you’ve already proved that conclusively. Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve pardoned your Sarite to save you the trouble. Look for him in a few days, and you will find he has become a Dragon Lord.”
“You base your hopes a good deal, my lord, on the man’s luck, which will one day desert him.”
Amrek smiled.
“All luck, Kathaos, comes to an end. Think of that sometime, when you lie in the bed of my mother.”
10.
ON A BLUE XARABIAN MORNING of the warm months, the entourage of the Storm Lord and his bride left Lin Abissa.
It was to be a slow journeying—a miniature city on the move, equipped with all necessities and luxuries. Twilight found them between Ilah and Migsha on the empty slopes— a settling of tents like a flock of birds. When the moon rose, a herd of zeebas, galloping across the star-burned silences, fled from the red twinkling of their fires.
• • •
The messenger who had ridden all the way from Koramvis, and whose news had displeased Amrek, made inquiries over his meat.
“The light-eyed man in the Storm Lord’s tent—who’s he now?”
“Some upstart from Sar. He crippled a man and got made a Dragon Lord. That’s how it is nowadays.”
“He has the look of the royal line,” said the messenger.
“Perhaps. He can handle his men—his division’s the crack division they tell me. He gave ’em a name, like in the old days—the Wolves. Ryhgon trained him, Kathaos’s dog, before his pupil turned on him. But the Dragon Guard spit on his shadow. He gave them a shaking up at Abissa—”
And across the lanes, in the owar-hide pavilion, Raldnor sat—at ease in the King’s tent.
The surprise of power had long since left him. He had been too busy that month and a half at Abissa, busy with the network of bribes and threats and preferments that ensured those of his new rank their safety. And he found himself a leader, too, as he had boasted he could be. There had been a rebirth on that night in the garden. He had talked his way into the trust of a man he hated, had spoken to that man as if he honored him, and as if he himself were a Vis. And yes. He had become a Vis in that dark garden.
Sitting here in the tent of the King, he thought back over that scene for only the second time. The first had been in the delirious aftermath, when he had felt an exhilaration mixed with panic. He remembered coolly now Amrek’s accusation: “You had the same father as I,” and how his pulses had leaped and pounded in an insane moment of total confusion. For, having momentarily forgotten his Plains blood, it seemed his unknown father, too, might be a Vis, any Vis—even a king.
It amused him now to wonder where his looks came from—some past venture in his ancestry, he surmised, showing itself, as sometimes happened, several generations later. After all then, the Xarabian woman had left some birthright—royal blood—to pass on to him.
Amrek, his King and patron, sat brooding. The news from Koramvis had irritated him. The Council demanded that he leave his bride to travel alone, and ride posthaste to the Dortharian border of Thaddra, that wild and mountain-locked land, source of constant dispute and foray. There was fresh trouble there, and the Storm Lord must be seen as an ever-present power, not dallying with his woman in Xarabiss. So it was. He was the ultimate ruler of a continent, yet he must obey his Council. And he did not want to leave his scarlet-haired girl, Raldnor could see. Did he then love her? Raldnor, observing her in the distance of his life, acknowledged her beauty was astounding, but she seemed like a waxwork, a puppet moving very gracefully on strings. He had never been near enough to hear her speak, but he could imagine her voice—perfect, and quite without tone.
The question came suddenly to Raldnor, as he watched the King’s dark, empty face: “This man I’ve allowed to give me every scrap I have; do I hate him as implacably as ever?” The white ghost sprang up into the tent but could not entirely materialize for him. Raldnor had lost half his blood, half his soul. The schism of divided race had finally resolved itself, and the Lowlander was eclipsed by the black-haired man. It was hard to hate now, and the pale girl who came in the night, still came, even between the silky sheets of Lyki’s bed, was only a dismal dream, no longer accompanied by meaning.
“If an assassin ran into this place seeking Amrek’s life,” he thought with sudden surprise, “I’d kill him.”
“Well, Raldnor Am Sar,” Amrek said, “I’ll leave the charge of this entourage with you.”
“I’m honored, my lord.”
“Honored? You and those Wolves of yours will die of boredom on the road. But my Karmian—keep her safe for me. Remember, I’m not a fair man. If she wants the moon, get it out of the sky for her.”
He rose and put his hand on Raldnor’s shoulder. It was unmistakably a gesture of knowing, not ownership. The King was at ease with him, and he at ease with the King. But then, there had been a strange sort of ease between them from the first.
“You can trust me,” Raldnor said, and knew it to be true. “When does your Lordship leave?”
“Tomorrow, first light.” One of the lamps flickered and went out. Amrek gazed at it and thought: “In a tent like this my father died on the Plains. A white woman with yellow hair killed him, and left her marks on my body before I was born. It always meant a great deal to me. Now less. Why is that, I wonder? Has she done it, the Karmian enchantress? I seem to see everything from behind cool dark glass. I vowed to erase the yellow scum from the face of Vis, but now I see only shadows, not devils. . . .”
He glanced at Raldnor.
“In your hands then. And be glad I didn’t take you away from your own woman.”
• • •
Lyki’s body lay stretched in the black sheets like a star. A shaft of moonlight pierced the tent and blanched her flesh to fiery snow, bleached her hair to a negative without color.
“I think you never sleep,” she murmured.
“I prefer to lie and look at you.”
“Does Amrek still permit you to be insolent to him?”
“Amrek guesses, I think, who led me to him in Thann Rashek’s garden. What lover were you coming from then?”
“A man I abandoned for you.” She lay still, then said: “So Amrek rides to Thaddra. My lady will be even more difficult then, no doubt. I’m sure that she’s deranged; sometimes she moves like a sleepwalker. She says the oddest things—” Lyki always spoke of Astaris in this way.
“You’re very intolerant of the woman who provides your bread.”
“Oh, what a banal statement. Such a betrayal of your peasant origins,” Lyki said tartly.
But presently she said other things to him as he caressed her in the dark.
A storm rolled over the slopes near dawn. He woke from the dream and could not for a moment remember where he was. The dark girl was sitting up combing her hair, and she turned a pair of cool gem eyes on him in the half light.
“Astaris has dreams, too,” she said with asperity. It was part of her character that she was sometimes sharp with him, particularly when he was vulnerable, as now: she knew of his recurring nightmare, though not the content.
“Does the princess, then, discuss her dreams with you?”
“Oh no. But she left a paper lying by her bed, and she’d written on it very clearly.”
“And you read the paper.”
“Why not? It said: ‘I dreamt again of the white woman blown to ashes.’ That was all. I remember very well.”
He felt a cold wind pass over him, and the hair rose on his neck. He sat up.
“When was this?”
“Let go my shoulder. You’re hurting me. It was a day or so ago. I forget. Is it Astaris you want now, instead of me?”
He shook the icy tendrils off him and pulled her down.
“You, you faithless bitch.”
And tried to lose the incredible sense of fear in the core of her gol
den limbs.
• • •
There were partings at dawn—a private parting between the King and his bride, a public one among the tents. Troops presented arms; the Wolves showed well.
Raldnor had been drunk in his way when he had asked for a command among the Dragon Guard—his well-established enemies—but sober enough afterward. He had picked his men with care, his captains with more than care, and not from among the Guard. Kathaos’s halls had taught him other lessons besides those of combat. He took his levy from the general bulk of the army—raw recruits, still young and inexperienced. It had interested and pleased them to learn they had been singled out from the mass; it was easy enough to have these newly enlisted molded to his specification, and to impress them. For he possessed, like Ryhgon, a reputation, and he used it better. They saw what he could do with sword, ax and spear, and when Kothon, promoted from the Chariot Corps, had taught him the ways of the flimsy Dortharian vehicles, they saw that here was a charioteer also. His veterans he selected cunningly. Like Kothon they were soldiers, intelligent in their particular trade, but in little else; limited men, who were contented with the good food and pay he saw they got and did not mind his increasingly long shadow cast over them. For he had walked by Amrek a great deal in Abissa and accomplished, in various ways, an admirable amount in the brief time he had there. He never questioned his abilities. His life had been inactive once; now he made up for those lost and useless years in a surge of judgment and power.
The Storm Lord, with his Guard and personal, small entourage, rode over the slopes, bypassing Migsha, and was gone. It was too early in the year for dust to mark their passing. And there was a good deal of mud on the first part of Astaris’s royal progression.
The princess recaptured her solitude and lay bathed in it. She had responded to Amrek’s inner pain with vague maternal stirrings which surprised her, but even these small tokens had been exhausting. He had leaned on her so heavily. She sensed his need, yet the impassable barrier remained to lock her in, away from him as from all others. She experienced the bewilderment of closeness without intimacy, understanding without knowledge, a blind communion through layers of gauze. And when he left, she felt herself emptied of the little she had achieved with him. Quite suddenly he became again a stranger. Yet the stranger had worn her out.
They passed through Migsha moving north. She sat like a doll at feastings and withdrew early. She did not notice that Amrek’s new Dragon Lord watched her for a time very closely, for, as always, she scarcely noticed anything at all.
• • •
In the streets of the beautiful cities of Xarabiss, girls tossed early flowers, which fell in a rain about the procession and were trampled by the feet of men and pack animals and under the wheels of the chariots. To Raldnor the whole journey through Xarabiss came to be symbolized by this odor of crushed, bruised blossom, and by the eyes of women fixed on his face as he rode at the head of his Wolves.
In the warm humid evenings women would come to garrison gates, decked out in their various fineries, to request the pleasure of entertaining him. Sentries teased them, asked if they would do and finally divided the spoils among themselves. Something of Raldnor’s past rose up and sickened him. The Vis woman was a harlot, everyone a daughter of the Red Moon. The easy victories after the aridness before had begun to cloy. And these dark ladies were jealous too, as he saw too often with Lyki.
They crossed into Ommos, and there also his past caught him hard.
A narrow land with narrow-towered cities, ruled by a cruel, perverse code. Scant honor for Amrek’s bride here— she was a woman, merely the house of unborn men. The entourage kept to its own metropolis, the encampment, as it traveled. Only in Hetta Para, the capital, did they pause— etiquette dictated that they should. Uhgar, the king, had something of Yr Dakan in him for Raldnor; it was inevitable that he should. Raldnor took in the gaudy feasts, the fire dancers, the blazing-bellied Zaroks, the pretty simpering boys, with a grave face. Here, men, not women, importuned him. He was revolted but he had learned a sardonic tact along with the rest.
He slept poorly at Hetta Para.
On the second and third night in the capital he rose and walked along the bleak upper galleries of the palace, which were open to a sky full of enormous stars. He thought of Orklos, and of Anici. He became a Lowlander for brief agonizing seconds. It came to him at last, among the stones of Ommos, how pathetic Anici’s life and beauty had been to her.
Then he saw something that was like an omen—indecipherable, yet charged with portent.
Across the walls and the gulfs between them, a woman with blood-red hair stood on her balcony, wrapped in a blizzard of untimely snow. Astaris, dressed in a cloak made from the pelt of one perfect and unmarked ice-white wolf, the gift to her of the lord Kathaos, who had bought it by proxy in the market of Abissa. Raldnor shuddered.
He turned away, back into the corridors. She had been like a phantom to him. And he could not forget that she dreamed dreams which were his own. Anici had become a curious property between them.
Lyki had come to his bed in his absence, and lay awaiting him with her expectant sensuality. He desired her only because she was available.
She lay afterward at his side in the dark and said: “I think I have your child.”
The banality of her statement irritated him.
“Why assume it’s mine?”
“It can be no one else’s, Raldnor my love. With the others I took care not to conceive. Besides, I’ve been faithful to you. Can you say the same?”
“There are no vows between us. You can do as you like.”
“Well, so I have. And I carry. Your seed. Does it mean nothing to you?”
He did not answer. Many Vis women bore their children without the accessory of a husband, yet he sensed in her a desire to bind him to her by her maternity, to show other women that he had put a piece of himself into her, as if he had chosen her specially for this purpose.
“You’re angry,” she chided him sharply. “Well, it’s done now. I told her”—by her inflection he understood she meant Astaris. “She gave me a strange look, but then she’s always strange.”
Three days after, the rolling caravan crossed the river into Dorthar.
The suns were dazzling that day. Under a white metal sky he made out a land like a woman’s dark hair drawn through a comb of blue mountains. There came an unexpected and unlooked-for quickening. Oddly, he felt he had seen Dorthar before.
• • •
Koramvis disturbed him deeply. Part of him had wished to remain unimpressed. But then, he knew from his reading, there was no city like her in all Vis. Never a city with such architecture, such grace, such splendor, such legends.
A man met them on the road.
“Val Mala, mother of the Storm Lord, sends fond greetings to her daughter Astaris Am Karmiss.”
And this would be all the greeting Astaris would get, Amrek being in Thaddra.
As with the city, Raldnor had expected and wanted something different. He had pictured Val Mala in the light of what was said about her: a woman in her middle years, prone to rage and terrible cruelty, a whore and a villainess. He visualized a dragon woman with lines of age and evil living on her face.
His Wolves flanked Astaris and her attendants into the Storm Palace; so he saw Val Mala for the first time.
She had twice his years, yet her vanity and wealth had retained for her the long youth of the Vis. She had a voluptuous, vibrant beauty. Compared to Astaris’s own it might seem a sort of vulgarity; yet conversely, set off by Val Mala, the Karmian seemed more than ever like something fashioned from wax. The Queen of Dorthar wore a gown of flaring liquid scarlet, and on either side of her chair was chained a long-necked scarlet bird with a spreading tail. One thing startled him, even though he had been told of it: the whiteness of the unguent on her skin.
“Astaris, you are to b
e my daughter from this moment.”
She did not bother to conceal her dislike, and the ritualistic words accentuated this. She embraced the Karmian as if she were poisonous.
“We have allotted you apartments in the Palace of Peace.”
It was an insult. A brief murmuring went up from the room. This palace, not its subsidiary, should house the future consort of the King. But the King was absent.
Astaris said nothing. It occurred to Raldnor how her immobility would infuriate. It amused him to see these two astonishing women locked in a form of mortal combat, and one of them so uninterested.
A steward tried to smooth the way with mutterings at the Queen’s ear. She spoke to him softly, and he paled.
It was to be a day of strangeness for Raldnor. When they passed through the gate of the Palace of Peace, he felt a dark bird fly over his brain. Kothon, his charioteer, jerked a blunt thumb at old black markings on the walls.
“See that, Commander? That’s part of the history of Dorthar. Have you heard of the Lowland woman, Ashne’e, the yellow-haired witch who killed Rehdon?”
“I’ve heard of her.”
“The soldiers came to take her, and found her dead. There was a crowd behind them, and they dragged the body out and burned it in Dove Square. The brands they carried made those scorches.”
A sickness came over Raldnor. Kothon did not notice. “This is what he plans for them all, all the people of the Plains, that man I sold my soul to,” Raldnor thought.
Then the cool bowl of the palace appeared among the trees.
And he knew it. Knew the pale color of the stone, the sound the leaves made through windows at certain points of the interior. Inside—what? He searched his mind in a cold frenzy. A mosaic floor—a picture of women dancing—and above, there was a room in a tower. . . . No, what could he know of all that?
Yet when he was inside, he saw the floor before him. He did not search the room in the tower, for the thought of it filled him with a peculiar dread.
“Up there,” Kothon said, applying wine to his grizzled chops, “that’s where she lay, the Lowland woman. They found her dead up there.”
