by Tanith Lee
The trek over the pass took a month. No robbers attacked or came to gather tax. The Storm Lord’s men had incidentally cleaned out most of their nests for the present. All told, it was a propitious journey.
The morning the wagons moved down into Thaddra, the mountains were hot and hard and blue.
It was a dark land—humid black jungle forest and still heat without much brightness from the sun. Rarnammon had built a city here once, but it lay in ruins. Now each area had its own guardian, or little king, all giving lip service to Dorthar and to Zakoris, and all bickering between themselves. It was a land to be lost in, and not found. A dark land indeed.
They came to a place called Tumesh, where there was a large and ugly town of squat swarthy buildings which resembled perfectly its inhabitants. Tumesh, as Thaddra went, was wealthy. She had, therefore, the money for Bandar’s goods—mostly ornaments and women—for metal ore, gems and prettiness were rare in Thaddra.
They settled in the great marketplace, and the old fat woman came puffing into the wagon. She stripped Astaris, and adorned her in a dress of mauve gauze and copper bangles, with paper orchids for her black hair. Astaris put up her hand and touched her hair, and smiled faintly. She was thinking of Raldnor and the dye that had preserved his secret, like hers. The woman, judging her quite insane, clucked at her and prodded her out on to the square.
There was a rostrum with a bell-hung awning. Under it Astaris was set to stand along with other girls who wept or smirked. Her surroundings affected her no more than a passing mist, for she was thinking only of him. It was her grief and her sustenance. She had no being except in what had gone before.
“You be careful, Bandar,” the fat woman muttered to him. “Don’t haggle too long over that one. She may have looks, but she’s daft and they’ll see it. And she’s got a brat coming.”
That last piqued Bandar’s curiosity. Was it Amrek’s child or the Sarite’s bastard? Well, no matter. It didn’t show in the gaudy dress, and she would probably lose it anyhow; she looked too fragile to bear, and she ate like a mouse, praise be.
The bidding began about noon.
A pair of Yllumite girls went first, sniveling, and a piece from Marsak next. Bandar began to be troubled. He led his prize forward and called out at the crowd. Had they no eyes for beauty—such a face, such limbs and breasts . . . and so meek. Had they ever seen so pliable and genteel a woman? She was built for pleasure.
It displeased him intensely that they still hung back. It never occurred to him that she might be too beautiful, too exquisite to appeal.
At last a big rough man came pushing through the crowd. He was tall for a Thaddrian, and heavily constructed, but under his matted hair showed a gold collar, and he wore a mantle of good cloth.
“You, sir. I see you understand the refinements—”
“Stop your squawking, merchant. I’ll take her. Here’s three bars.”
“That won’t do, my lord. This girl’s worth much more. Look at this straight spine. Think of the boys you can get on her—”
“Three bars are my last offer. You’ll be offered no better.”
No one bid against him. Bandar began to have suspicions that the lout was bandit stock, secreted in Tumesh, on the proceeds of his garnered wealth, since Amrek’s forays in the mountains. At last, with ungraceful resignation, he sold his wares and took the measly payment.
“What’s her name?”
“Silukis,” snapped Bandar.
“Seluchis,” said the man, corrupting the name at once with his Thaddrian-Zakorian slur.
Bandar, even his mother affronted now, thrust the girl into the brute’s keeping and wished them both ill of each other as he pocketed the silver bars.
• • •
His name was Slath, and he had made his money in robbery, as Bandar supposed, and also in hiring himself out as a cutthroat to the various lords of Thaddra. He bought the girl because she represented a form of elusive culture. He had seen it sometimes in old wall paintings in the ruined city of Rarnammon, where occasionally he holed up when things were uncomfortable for him. He was a romantic villain, and impulsive, and he knew he had made a mistake with her as soon as he got her into his house.
He gave her some wine and meat nevertheless, which she scarcely touched, and afterward he took her to his bedroom. She was as dull in that as in everything. Slath liked a woman with some spirit—a grunting bandit mare or a clever whore who pretended.
“A pleasure slave are you, by Zarduk! You’ll have to try harder than that.”
He reduced her position. She swept out hearths and carried water. After three days he whipped her for her negligence. She was simple and he had been cheated. She did not even wail and weep at his blows. He contemplated the blood trickling down her satin back. She was useless, fit only to be looked at. He held off the lash then and considered another possibility—perhaps some Thaddrian lord would buy her. She would look good beside a supper table in some little kingdom—a king’s ornament. Slath hung up his whip and sent one of his aides running for a salve.
• • •
There was a lord in the jungle forest, many miles northward. Slath had been meaning to hire out to him, if he wanted men. Slath disliked being long idle and, besides, had a certain reputation among his kind which would stand him in good stead. The lord was a great one for conquest, he had heard, a man of vague beginnings, like all lords in Thaddra it seemed, who had built his power from a store of treasure and gold, displaced the petty king and thereafter annexed five other kingdoms. Such a one offered good pickings. His shadow had been growing for years.
Slath did not travel light but with servants, to show his essential rank. After four days’ riding they reached one of the nameless rivers of Thaddra and poled upstream into the thick wet gloom of the forest.
At this time Slath kept his girl Seluchis on his own craft, under a shady awning, and tried to see to it that she was well fed. She sat like a statue, never moving, and seldom ate. He had not laid a finger on her since that first time. He pampered the bitch; nevertheless, he expected she would lose her looks, damn her. Somehow she did not. She seemed unaware of the languid heat, and once he observed a butterfly settle undisturbed on her wrist for nearly an hour. On the whole she made him uneasy, and he would be glad to be rid of her.
They were five days on the river. On the sixth there was a challenge. Slath, who had once bought a certain password in the ruined city, with a knife, was conducted from the creeper-grown jetty to a hacked-out jungle road.
By evening they had reached the walls of a large Thaddrian town with, clustered about them, an overspill of rough hide tents and wooden huts. Cook fires spangled the dusk, and in the untidy streets dogs ran and women stared. At the far end of the town rose the Guardian’s palace, a three-towered mansion of stone.
Astaris raised her head to look at it. It seemed to have some meaning for her, though what, she could not understand as it reared out of the twilight of her brain. For some time past there had been a curious glimmering, a disturbance in her mind, as if he were there, alive once again. But this could not be. She had felt his passing from her, and comprehended it. Raldnor. She suffered the false expression of his life in her, therefore, as if suffering the pain of a long-healed wound, something which stirred without reason, and for which nothing could be done.
In the wild garden at the palace’s foot ruby blossoms drooped and ruby birds slept. One of the blossoms opened its petals and flew away into the forest.
It was an old palace, rough built but strong. There were massive but unornamented pillars in the great hall, and a smoke hole in the roof to serve the fire pit, there being no hearth.
Slath was well received, given a couple of no-more-than-average drafty cells for himself and his servants and promised an audience after dinner with the lord Hmar. Slath used the hour before dinner well, strolling about among the gaudy hangings and the
snarling dogs, casually questioning here and there. When the meal was served, he found himself at one of the lower tables, and the food was plain but good. No one began their meat, however, until the lord was seated at his upper place.
Slath observed him closely and with a practical cunning. Hmar was a thin, oddly elegant man in his middle years. He ate with a niceness not common to the lords of Thaddra and seemed to expect those at his high table to do likewise; for the first time in a decade, Slath took care with his food. The face of Hmar was strange. It was like brown polished bone, of light complexion for a Thaddrian, and it gave nothing away—except, that was, for the eyes. They were narrow and flickering. They seemed in an eternal motion of search as if he quested for someone in the hall, some visitor he expected might be there at any moment. Slath recognized them as the eyes of a man in fear or very great unease.
And there had been talk. Slath had heard that Hmar had claimed, once or twice, to be the son of a goddess.
On the whole, Slath was pleased with the two aspects of Lord Hmar. If he was afraid, a little unbalanced, he would appreciate a strong and ruthless man to protect him, and, if he was so elegant, he would appreciate also the man’s slave.
He noticed then the woman standing at Hmar’s shoulder.
A swarthy Thaddrian, short and wide-hipped, with wiry black hair constrained in two plaits that fell below her waist. No woman in Thaddra or Zakoris would sit by her lord at table except the King’s High Queen at Hanassor. To stand at his side showed rank enough.
“Who’s the girl at the lord’s elbow?” he inquired of a neighbor.
“Not for your plate. Panyuma’s her name, the lord’s slut for five years.”
Slath took her in properly then. She was the sort of girl he liked himself, despite her sullen, haughty eyes. But there were bits of gold winking on her sandals and in her plaits, and she filled the lord’s cup with a proprietory air.
“A tasty lass,” Slath remarked carefully, knowing what he said might be repeated to her if she were powerful here, and that he could afford to be insolent but not derogatory. “But doesn’t Lord Hmar have more than one? It’s usual.”
“Oh, there are others. Ten or more, I’ve heard. Even some of those tall narrow females from the south. But he keeps them well hidden. Panyuma’s the only woman seen about him.”
Later, when Slath was summoned to the lord’s presence, he went with a cheerful mind. The interview was brief and to the point. Slath had done well and foresaw doing better. In the campaigns to come there would be swift promotion, and Hmar seemed indeed to be all he had judged him. Slath restrained his after-dinner belches in deference to the graceful manners, and grinned inwardly at those nervous flickering eyes. At the last he spoke of his trouble, the genteel-born girl he feared was going to be a nuisance to him in his quarters here.
“Of course, Lord Hmar, I’d throw her out without a second thought, if it weren’t for her remarkable looks. I saw her by sheer luck at a private sale—” He went on to say how he had been certain she was some noble’s sister reduced through a decline in family fortunes, and how he had paid fifty bars for her.
Hmar looked at him, and the restless eyes leveled for a moment.
“I’ve been told of your girl already. If you wish to sell her to me you may bring her, and I’ll consider the proposition.”
Jolted by this bluntness, Slath shouted at the door for his servants, and Seluchis was hurried in. She had been bathed and dressed in a robe of thin red silk; the pungent scent of cibba wood emanated from her flesh.
Her eyes lifted and came to rest on Lord Hmar.
Slath was startled. It was the first time he had seen any life in her eyes at all. For an instant a look seemed to pass between Hmar and the girl—the robber sensed a bizarre recognition on both their faces.
“Yes,” Hmar said shortly, but there was a curious tremor in his voice, “you may ask my man outside for fifty bars’ payment.”
Unnerved already, Slath had anticipated argument over the price; shocked again, he bowed himself feverishly out and left his slave to her new master.
• • •
It was as if, drifting for miles over a faceless ocean she had come suddenly in sight of a marker in the sea. Nothing good in it, nothing to bring her joy or peace, for these could never be hers again, yet something oddly recognized. She did not comprehend how she knew him. She did not know him as a man. She knew him as all things know their own death, and with as much despair.
He said tightly: “She is here. I sense Her here. How can She be here, because of you, you Vis woman?”
By this she understood that he too sensed his death, and she was his death. They were to be each other’s.
“So be it,” she said to him.
He started violently, then seemed to master himself—all but the darting eyes, which, instead of raking the room, now explored her intensely.
“You inspire me with fear. This should be amusing. You’re nothing. A slave. Offal. Whatever you once were has been obliterated. This is how it devolves upon us all. Once I was other than I am. Now I am Hmar, goddess-born, Guardian King of six ant heaps of Thaddra. Panyuma!” he cried out suddenly, and almost at once a curtain parted and a small dark woman slunk through on glittering feet. She looked directly at Astaris, but her broad-boned face was empty. “Panyuma,” Hmar said softly, “take her and prepare her.”
“Yes, lord,” Panyuma said. Her aspect was of a malignant nurse humoring an evil child. But Astaris felt no protest at what was to come. The Thaddrian woman took her arm and conducted her out, and up long flights of ancient stairs.
The last metallic stains of sunset were fading from the sky.
The woman dressed her in a black robe heavy with gold, and wound jewels in her hair. Gold was put around her throat and on her arms and fingers and ears. Astaris grew aware of a curious coldness piercing her where the gold touched her skin.
In the orpiment twilight Panyuma led her through deserted corridors and finally to a granite wall. There was a mechanism in the floor which the Thaddrian clearly knew well. Bare stone parted and revealed a dim-lit gallery beyond. With a swift thrust Panyuma pushed her through, and the walls grated shut between them.
It was a place of the dead.
Here, past Guardians had been buried in the immemorial manner of Vis kings. Vast carved boxes contained their bones, with silver cups and bronze swords heaped up on them, and all about them their warriors frozen forever on their feet, shrunk to black sticks in their armor, with glass gems winking in their eyes. The air was heavy with dust and with the smell of those old embalmings.
But at one end of the gallery was something different. A lamp burned on a stand, and Hmar was sitting on a couch to face her. Behind him ranked ten women with gold burning on their hands and throats, and violet jewels in their hair. Astaris understood three things at once. The women lived, but they did not move, would never move and she was to become one of them.
“I see you comprehend,” Hmar said to her. He rose and came forward and there was a gold cup in his hand. “You’re to be a gift to my mother. I put her gold and her jewels on you, and then I make you as still. She hunts me in the dark. I angered her. But she loves me too, my mother Anack. Fear and love. Here, take the cup. Drink it down. A poison of the jungle, but without pain. A living death. And it will make you immortal. And you’ve no choice, I assure you, madam.”
When she smiled at him and reached out immediately for the cup, he paled. She had reminded him again of another woman, years before, whose name had been Ashne’e.
Astaris emptied the cup. Still smiling, she asked him: “How long must I wait?”
“Not long,” he said.
And it was true. Already she felt the cool passage of the liquor through her body, and presently she ceased to blink.
“Now I shall be what I have always truly been,” she thought.
After a time he picked up her inert body and laid it on the couch; it was still malleable enough for his purpose. She observed his frenzied ecstasy remotely. It was a preliminary and she felt nothing of it. When he was finished, he set her up beside the couch like a doll, arranging her hands as he had arranged the hands of those others. He seemed to be speaking, but she could no longer hear him, and soon her sight also began to fade from her wide open eyes.
She was drowsy, near to the black sleep he had given her. She thought: “Now I am the icon I was always. This is fitting; only the shell and nothing left within.” Then came the stirring in her womb, troubled, seeking. “Be still,” she thought. “You were his and mine, but we are nothing now. Be still.”
The dark came suddenly after that and took her away with it.
• • •
In the night, as so often, Anack came for him. He heard the dry rustling of her scales like dead leaves blown about the floor. The white moon of her face crested the foot of the bed. On her head the serpents hissed, and he saw her snake teeth gleam like fire.
He screamed for Panyuma, and woke.
The woman held him in her swarthy arms, but at first he did not recognize the corruption of his name when she spoke it.
“I am Amnorh, High Warden of Koramvis,” he thought, bewildered, as she muttered her dark forest magic to keep spirits at bay. But then he remembered who he was, and how the incantation could keep him safe. For he had come to believe in these things, being no longer independent of their terror.
15.
ALL NIGHT LONG HE heard the oars crooning in the water. They had for him the sound of death.
The boat was a narrow, shallow sea-skimmer carrying oil and iron into Zakoris. Raldnor slept, as did all the occasional passengers, under awning on her deck.
