by Tanith Lee
The royal hunt today was all part of the exercise. He did not think Astaris would enjoy it, if she noticed it at all. But there would be intervals when he could discreetly engage her attention.
Amrek was too demanding for her. It was subtlety that breached her remoteness, or so it seemed to him. It would be a game he liked to play, and which he was good at.
She looked like some exquisite pastoral goddess for the ride. He wondered who dressed her so well; she herself he could imagine taking no personal interest in such things. Lyki, perhaps, the Sarite’s discarded mistress, chose her wardrobe.
And the Sarite was there also. Kothon absent from his chariot, he was handling his team himself.
The man was still a thorn in Kathaos’s side. He had had an intermittent watch set on him, but Raldnor was probably aware that such a thing was possible and accordingly careful. It seemed he had done no specific damage. As often before, Kathaos pondered his origins and his purposes, achieving no solid answers. There was the story, too, of Raldnor and the Queen. Certainly it had been a brief enough liaison. And now Val Mala had shut her doors to all comers, the lord Councilor included. He had heard she was ill. Kathaos sensed many threads leading down into some furiously productive yet hidden loom.
He saw that Raldnor had raised his hand to him in formal salute. On impulse, Kathaos trotted his team level with the Sarite’s vehicle.
“I trust that you’ll enjoy the hunting, Dragon Lord.”
“I’m here to escort the princess, lord Councilor, not to enjoy myself.”
“It’s praiseworthy that you take your duties so seriously. But I assure you the princess will be quite safe in this company.” The light eyes, so reminiscent of past royalty, were full of ironical disdain in the impassive face. “Your rank becomes you very well,” Kathaos said. “Perhaps I did you a service, indirectly. And how is the Queen these days?”
The look in the eyes altered, and for a fleeting second Kathaos saw he had touched a nerve. With the polite friendly nod reserved for useful underlings or merchants, Kathaos turned his chariot.
• • •
Noon had brought unexpected heat to the still, windless day. Cloud masses were already building for a storm.
Grooms flushed orynx from their shallow lair with burning pitch; the kalinx pack was unleashed and the chariots rumbled after.
The hunting was not to Raldnor’s taste. It was the old Lowland ways which troubled him again. A man hunted only for food or clothing or in self-defense. It was another mark of the effete and the sadistic to take life as a sport. He had detailed three of his captains to trail Astaris’s chariot. It was privacy he wanted in these woods. Once he had been too much alone. Now he felt crowded. Always a man at his door, Kothon at his back, the bickering court, the soldiers’ gossip. Even the women in his bed with their post-coital questionings.
Like all men forced consistently to lie, he felt now the pressure of being absorbed by his false self.
Heat beat and blazed through the forest roof. He thought of Val Mala and what she had cheated him of. The pang of his sex strove in him to make itself a strange component of his fear. For he feared her, feared her words to him. A hundred times each day he reasoned them away—over wine, at drill, lying snared in the satisfaction and arms of some woman after love. And she had done nothing, the white-faced Dortharian woman. Was she mad, then? At worst, even if she spoke, Amrek hated and distrusted her. When he thought of Amrek, he was filled now with abrupt uncertainties. He felt that absence had estranged what he had known. Amrek was once more stranger; and legends, ghost stories had come between. He recalled his moment of burning loyalty in the tent between Hah and Migsha with discomfort, almost with shame.
All light suddenly drained from the sky. The chariot team quivered the length of their bodies and stopped still. The whole scene seemed to congeal in soundless stasis. It brought Raldnor from his thoughts. He glanced upward through the carved boughs into a breathless mahogany overcast. Not a whisper of wind or rustle of life. It occurred to him that there seemed to be no birds. Then the light blackened totally and was gone; the sun had been put out. In the preternatural midnight, a gust of primeval terror swept over him. It had nothing to do with actual fear. It was something older, more intrinsic.
His head ringing with silence, he jumped from the chariot and slashed the team free. They ran at once, their shod pads making no noise.
The thunder came then. Not from the sky. It was under his feet.
The grass parted without wind. The trees began to creak and shake their leaden flags. The earth pitched. He was thrown against iron limbs a moment, but the ground was trembling and sliding. He rolled helpless across a landscape upset on its side. A large cibba sprang up with a victorious scream and appeared to bound in great hops across the forest floor. Other trees fell in ranks. He could not rise. He lay scrabbling at the soil like a terrified animal. There was nowhere to run or to hide.
The last spasm, when it came, was almost gentle. It rolled, like a sea wave, languidly, over the ground, and settled.
He lay there, holding on to the still land with his hands. Presently he got to his feet and spat earth from his mouth. He might have been in a different place. Dragon oaks leaned sideways; others lay across their own chasmic uprootings. One had smashed the back of his chariot.
He began to walk through the leveled forest as the sky lightened to cinnamon. He negotiated fallen things and the places where the rock had split and spewed up underlying humus.
There was a clearing ahead of him, a clearing that had not been there before. He glimpsed what remained of a chariot and its team. A man lay on his side—dead. There was a woman standing not far off. It was so dark still that he did not make out the color of her hair until he was near.
Her face was like parchment, her eyes wide open and completely blank. She might have been dead though still somehow standing, like the warriors in ancient Vis tombs. In a moment of enraged sanity he wondered where in damnation were the captains he had sent after her. He stopped half a yard away and said: “Princess.” She did not answer or look at him. “Are you hurt?” he said. She had never been so physically close to him; neither had he seen her so empty. She had seemed before only vacuous, hidden away, closed in, but now she was hollowed out. She might have been cauterized to her very soul. It was no longer applicable to treat her as something royal and untouchable, though any man who laid a finger on her, without prior consent by the Storm Lord, would lose the hand as well. That was their law. But this was only a woman, a living creature in need. He put his hands on her shoulders, but her eyes did not even flicker.
Conscious of holding back his strength, he slapped her face, then caught her as the blow toppled her. He felt all her sinews loosen, and so continued to hold her up. Her eyelids fluttered. The film left her eyes, and suddenly she was back inside them, looking out.
“I’ve never seen death before,” she said in a cool and rational voice. “They kept it from me.”
“Are you hurt?” he asked her again.
“No. I am alive.”
He knew from her tone she meant something other.
A growl of storm thunder ripped the shattered clouds. The sky began to weep, a long drowning sheet of cold tears.
“Who are you?” she asked suddenly.
With a certain irony he said: “The Commander of your highness’s personal guard.”
The rain beat down. Her fabulous hair seemed full of fires.
He had never thought to desire her before. She was too beautiful, too unalive. But now, still holding her shoulders in the lashing rain, he met for the first time, and fully, those unsurpassable wells of her eyes. And though her face still reflected serene abstraction, there came a thrust of pure ego in him—his reaction to her and against her. And abruptly he had bridged the depths of her eyes and found their floor, and she was in his skull like a flame and he in hers.
&
nbsp; There was a moment of shock and utter fear between them both, but each knew the other totally.
She said aloud: “How—?”
“You know.”
“Wait—” she cried out, “wait—” But there was a wild joy in her face, and in her mind a conflagration. He knew all the internment as she had known it, as she knew all of his.
He pulled her against him and she moved to him as frenziedly. The longing came swift and devouring and fed on itself in each of them.
In the black ruin of the forest, under the spinning sky, they came together in a coupling like beasts in the aftermath of horror, and as if they had awaited it all their lives, like the last man and the last woman in the world.
• • •
The pulse of the rain had slackened.
He looked at her face and said softly: “This was insane. Anyone could have come here and found us. I shouldn’t have exposed you to risk like that.”
She smiled.
“You didn’t think of it. Neither did I.”
There stirred between them that communion given to their minds. He kissed her mouth and lifted her to her feet. He might have known her always, she him. The visions of her life before were nebulous, locked in; she had experienced no great yearnings or doubts. His own ambitions, dreads, desires had faded. At this moment she was all he wanted. He could not see beyond it.
“We could find a wagon in the hills, travel over the mountains like peasants. We’d be safe in Thaddra,” he said.
“They’d find us,” she said.
“What then? What? Amrek takes you and I waste my life in his armies.”
“For now,” she said, “for me, this is enough. I have no gods, but She, perhaps, will help you.”
Knowing everything, she knew also his race. He did not fear her knowledge or resent it. In a way, she had made him back into what he was, but it was the best of him, not the least.
There came a shout from the trees. It came from another planet. He did not at first believe in it. But she cast at him one long glance, full of sadness and regret. And then they were apart and she was quite still, an icon again, the nadir of her eyes dissolved once more in subterranean amber.
Four of Kathaos’s men had found them. They looked askance at Raldnor, embarrassed that they had known him before his circumstances altered. A captain of the Wolves was with them; the other two were dead, crushed in the deep gut of an earth crack.
She looked no different when she mounted the chariot and was driven away. Only the echo of her thoughts remained, like music carried on the wind.
Seven milk-white cows were slaughtered before the altars of the Storm gods. Did the steaming blood appease their anger? Who knew for sure, though the auguries improved when groped for in the entrails.
Half a forest felled, great rocks displaced. Ibron had boiled like a caldron.
For the most part Koramvis had escaped. Some dwellings in the lower city came down and a whorehouse, killing ten of its best girls. It was a religious city for many days.
• • •
Kathaos, sitting in his carved chair, an open book before him, let them wait a little, shuffling their feet; let them see, these two dragon soldiers, that it was not his custom to give time to such as they. In the corners twilight thickened stealthily.
“You requested an audience with me,” he said eventually, “you have it. I understand that you’re oppressed by some problem regarding Raldnor Am Sar.”
“Yes, my lord,” one spoke. The other kept silent, staring at the ground.
“If this is so, why come to me? Should you not seek out the Dragon Lord himself?”
“Dragon Lord!” The man looked ready to spit but remembered where he was in time. “Your pardon, my lord, but I’d not have any doings with him.”
“If you’ve some charge, soldier, you should try the public prosecutor.”
“I thought the matter better brought to you, my lord. As the Lord Amrek is away.”
A cunning look revealed itself. This lout saw personal advantage in backing Kathaos against Amrek.
“Very well,” Kathaos said, “I will listen.”
“My lord, it’s dangerous for me to speak—”
“You should have thought of this earlier. Already you’ve said enough to give me the right to detain you. Proceed.”
“The quake,” the dragon said unexpectedly. There was a mixture of craft and superstition on his face. “The gods were angry. I think, I think I know why. I was with the Storm Lord’s garrison in Abissa, my lord. The Lowland muck still creeps in and out there— Rashek cares more for trade than a clean city . . .”
“Keep to the point, soldier. Your slanders are inept.”
“Pardon, my lord. I’ll be brief. There was a Lowland rat without a permit. He pulled a knife on me, but the damned Xarabians got it off him and swore he never had it. I remembered him after, went looking for him with Igos here. We got his girl, but King Amrek found out about it and took her off our hands—kept her too, I reckon, till he got tired of her. We never had a taste—”
“Are these sordid grievances all you have to tell me?”
The soldier muttered and said: “I had another look for the Lowlander after, my lord. Traced him to a Xarabian’s house—the Xarab said he wasn’t there, only his own brother with a fever. Couldn’t find a sniff of him then—thought he’d scuttled back to his cesspit in the Plains. But I’d know him again, my lord. So would Igos.”
“Indeed. And what has this to do with me?”
“He’s here, my lord. In Koramvis. He calls himself Raldnor of Sar.”
Kathaos’s expression did not for a moment alter. He said: “Such an accusation is as stupid as it is absurd.”
“Oh, no, my lord. I remember him. Same build, same looks—Vis blood somewhere. The Lowlander was missing a little finger on the left hand. And this Raldnor has pale eyes, my lord—that’s rare in a Vis. And easy to dye his hair. At first I wasn’t sure, but he’s been about a lot, since the King took him up. In the end, I was certain, and Igos, too. If the Storm Lord knew it—”
“So you came to me.”
“Your lordship took him on first—not knowing. And he maimed your Guard Lord—”
“Does anyone else know of this?”
“No, my lord, I swear—”
“Very well. The information may be useful to me. Go downstairs, the servant will show you. I’ll see you get a meal. And some form of monetary reward for your time.”
Kathaos’s servant took the grinning dragon and his sullen mate below, having recognized the brief sign his master had given him. The two would be drugged with their drink and then disposed of. They were not the first voluntary spies who had gone that way into the dark, and would not be greatly missed, for soldiers, even dragons, deserted all the time.
Kathaos sat locked in thought. He had killed from caution, for an extraordinary idea had come into his mind. He knew the story: the yellow-haired woman, Ashne’e, who slew her baby, and devoured it, so the rabble believed. In more sophisticated circles, the disappearance of the child had been laid at several doors—Amnorh the Councilor’s, Val Mala’s, even Orhn’s. Yet, if it had lived—
A yellow-eyed man, part Lowlander, part Vis—royal Vis—Rehdon’s blood. . . . How often that resemblance had troubled Kathaos. Could it be that here lay the missing piece of the puzzle?
Raldnor. Raldnor, Rehdon’s bastard by a Lowland witch.
Did he know it? No. Neither his actions nor his demeanor indicated knowledge.
Kathaos reflected upon the ancient law—that law which held that the last child conceived of the Monarch before his death was his heir. He visualized the throne of Dorthar. It had fascinated Kathaos, shining in the distance all his adult life. And now, here was the means of realizing the mirage—an insane yet feasible means, which would use Raldnor as its pivot.
For the regency was the penultimate step toward the throne itself. And in the end, a King, tainted with Lowland blood, would be easy to be rid of.
12.
THE LONG SOFT SUNSET of the hot months rested on the mountains and the hills in chalks of red and lavender and gold. Raldnor rode the chariot above Koramvis, using the little-known tracks, the byways. But he was too skillful—the management of the vehicle did not take up all his mind. It left him free to think of her.
Amrek was expected in three days. Raldnor had not been near her since the day of the quake. He had seen her, as before, far off, a moving doll on strings. Sometimes, but not often, he felt the moth flicker of her mind in his, but rarely. She did not trust him among strangers, or else she did not trust herself. Sometimes in the dark he would feel her insubstantial presence close enough to touch. Even in these brief contacts, the speech of their minds had gone far beyond words, into those abstract yet specific concepts which are the soul of the brain.
And he was mad for her, and she for him. He knew this much. The Star tortured both of them. He took no women into his bed now, wanting none of them, only her. He seldom slept. He burned, as once before. “She has made me a Lowlander again,” he thought. She had been a virgin. It had not surprised him once he had so completely known all her life. She had never desired a man before him. Now her passion was as exclusive as his. Yet neither sought the other. They were hemmed in by codes—they, who were unique.
