by Tanith Lee
“Raldnor,” he said, “your hair—is white.”
Raldnor did not look at him. His eyes and face were quite blank.
“Sea salt,” he said quietly. “It bleaches out the best dye. I’m a Lowlander, Yannul.”
Yannul swore again, softly.
“I thought in Abissa . . . I wondered— But, Raldnor, all that time in Koramvis—you dared that deception with Amrek?”
“An irony worthy of the annals of the old myths I used to read. Yes, I was Amrek’s nearest Commander. I stood at his right hand. I nearly bedded his mother; certainly I took his betrothed. I fell from my office because of simple indiscretion, not race. There was no hint of my blood. I was Dortharian, and my crimes suited me excellently. I am Amrek’s brother.”
“His brother—”
“Rehdon’s son. Not by Val Mala, as you will surmise. Ashne’e carried me, the amber-haired witch. She accommodated me in the womb which killed my father.” The words had come flooding from him, yet he felt no release at speaking, or any pain. On the horizon a dark cloud was resting against the sea, blotting out the lower hemisphere of the sun.
“Then, by the law of Dorthar, you’re their King,” Yannul said. There seemed to be no doubt or query in his voice; both the situation and the curious blank face of the teller carried their own conviction. Besides, Yannul had always sensed some vein of mystery in this man he had called a friend.
“The King of Dorthar.”
Raldnor smiled blindly at the sea, at his own thoughts. “There’s the island Elon promised us,” he said.
Yannul, startled, turned about and saw it. Simultaneously the watch yelled from above, and men came running to the deck.
It was a mere small silhouette lashed by the sea. It had no look of home. Yet men shouted and pummeled each other’s shoulders.
Only the dead men under the awning continued their silence, as if they were wiser, or more content.
• • •
The island.
It was formed in the shape of a flat platter; at its center steep-built rocks, smoking with white falls, splayed above into a broad plateau. Jungle rose in blue-black tiers from the beach, noisy with birds. They flew in flocks, wheeled screaming in the sky, vocal with alarm at this invasion.
Rorn’s Daughter cast down her anchor in the bay and the boats put out; only the women and a handful of the men were left behind with their officers to watch the ship.
Their legs were uncertain on the ground. Men rolled and played like babies in the nacreous sand.
Elon split them into parties to fetch water or food. Tullut and Ilrud fashioned slings and brought down the bright birds for meat. Others splashed in sapphire pools, scooped gourds full of these sapphires, then spilled them, tossed them over their heads, yelling. It was a land of plenty indeed, this place where things could be wasted.
No men lived here—at least, they saw none.
Yannul plucked an orchid and tucked it in a rent in his shirt.
“Do you think I could persuade a few of these to grow in some earth on the ship? This sort of flower would fetch coins from the ladies of Alisaar.”
Many of them were talking of Alisaar now, and of Zakoris. Even this little ground had made them optimistic. They looked less narrowly at the bluer-than-blue fiery sea.
As they sat on the beach with their grilled meat and fresh water, a group of men came running from the forest, carrying yellow fruit. There had been a deal of craziness, but these men looked wild and mad, garlanded with flowers, laughing uproariously.
“What’s this?” Elon asked them.
“A rare fruit—a wonderful fruit,” a man cried out. “It goes to your head like a wine of Xarabiss.”
Tullut clicked his tongue disapprovingly.
“Did you eat it? Foolish of you. None of us know what grows here. It might be poisonous.”
“Might be—might be—”
Men mimicked him. They were drunk indeed, juice dribbling on their chins, throats and chests as they scrabbled again for the yellow fruit.
Elon turned away. Men capered up the beach.
Raldnor saw Jurl emerge from the nearest tree line, two or three of his followers trailing after. He came to the fruit pile and picked about in it.
“It’s good then?”
“But not necessarily good to eat,” Elon said. “I thought you were to stay aboard the ship, Jurl, to keep your rowers in order.”
“Only the Aarl lords will trouble Rom’s bitch in this sea. I rode the boats as you did, deck master.” Jurl took a bite at the flesh of the fruit and ate, grinning open-mouthed. “The men are better judges of the table than you, Elon.” He hefted a couple of the fruits and went to eat them at another fire about which the drunken men were dancing.
Gradually, one by one, some uneasily, some swaggering, men went to join him. They were of his faction, believing in his brutal authority, or else excited by his lack of scruple. There had been several cries of approval over the dead men under the awning.
Soon the group about Jurl grew murderously loud. They began to push out the boats again, skipping and guffawing.
“They’ll bring in the watch off the ship,” Tullut exclaimed. “Deck master, she should have some guard, whatever deserted sea we’re in.”
Elon stared at the white hem of the water.
“Do I have authority to stop him, Tullut? There seem to be few men about this fire.”
“They’re drunk on the fruit, woman-weak—”
Elon got up without another word. Stiff as a plank, he walked down the beach toward the crazy garlanded men and their boats. Raldnor rose; Tullut, Yannul and a few others followed, falling into step behind him as he went after Elon. The wheeling birds embroidered the sky in slow persistent circles.
Suddenly Jurl came thrusting out of the press. The fruit had intoxicated him, though he had not adopted the other men’s garlands or mannerisms. Like a man accustomed to wine, his character had not been blurred or altered, but rather sharpened, accentuated.
“What are you doing, Jurl?” Elon said.
“Bringing the last men and oars-pigs, and the whores from the ship. You wouldn’t deny them the island, would you?”
“They’ll be denied nothing. I’ll send a relief party shortly, when the men are rested.”
“The ship needs no guard, Elon. Not here.”
“I haven’t ordered you to disband the watch.”
“You. You no longer order anything. Go chew your bread and water, my lady, while we men enjoy ourselves.”
“You’ll answer for this in Hanassor,” Elon said softly into the silence.
“Hanassor.” Jurl spat. He had not caught their faith. “If and when is good enough. And I’ll have charges of my own. Against that landsdog at your shoulder, for one. By Zarduk, Dortharian, can’t you keep your nose out of anything?”
“The beach is as much mine as yours,” Raldnor said, “and your voice carries a good way.”
Jurl’s hand flickered at his belt and came back with the knife. The silence crackled.
“Put away your blade,” Elon said.
A man giggled, high like an excited girl.
“Let’s have them fight—Ten draks on the oars master.”
Voices cheered raucously.
“Well, Dortharian, do you take me? You’ve seen this blade used before,” Jurl said. “Milk hair.”
Raldnor’s hand moved in its own practiced manner, and produced a knife. One or two men noticed the professional intimacy of the gesture, and some of the cheers broke off.
“Yes, you’ve used the blade before—on half-dead men,” Raldnor said. “I’ll take you.”
Jurl started forward, but somehow Elon interposed himself. Jurl turned snarling and slashed into the deck master’s body. Red splashed on the white ground. Red licked up Jurl’s knife like flame. Ju
rl jumped sideways for the nearest boat, men leaping after him. They pulled for Rom’s Daughter and were out in the bay moments after Elon fell.
Tullut ran forward and took Elon’s head on his knee, but Elon’s eyes were already filmed over and opaque with death. His blood soaked in the sand.
• • •
They buried him in the sand and shingle at the fringe of the jungle, but it was shallow soil. They struck stone too soon. There were animals, too, not seen before and not showing themselves now, only little rustlings in the forest, bright blinks of eyes, to intimate their presence. And the birds flew round the darkening sky, wailing their greed. So the man raked off the sand and piled on twigs and creeper, and fired them. It was a cleaner burial, but the stench of burning flesh drove them far along the beach.
Tullut moved away from them all and stood alone in the twilight as the charcoal ashes that were Elon blew and smoldered. It was not a man’s part to weep, and, if he must, he grieved in hiding. It came to Raldnor, with sudden remembered pain, how he too had once restrained his tears as he walked behind Eraz’s bier at Hamos.
A huge moon floated over the trees.
A red glare spiraled and smoked from the plateau above, and sounds of singing and pipes and noisy calls came over the wash of the sea and the small muted thunder of the falls.
The boats had come back to the island as they carried the tinder to Elon’s body. Laughing men and screeching women had exploded across the beach into the trees, carrying lanterns and casks of beer from Drokler’s private storage hold. Now they drank, and ate the fruit, and sang around their fires on the rock.
Tullut came walking slowly back across the sand, his face in shadow.
“Tullut!” A sailor caught his arm, “Tullut, let’s take a boat, get to the ship and sail her. There must be some safe way home. We can leave them their island.”
“No,” Tullut said.
The tide had climbed higher up the sand, hushing in slow pale whispers, like a mother with a child.
“By Zarduk,” the sailor said, “it wouldn’t make me sad if the fruit poisoned them as you said it would, Tullut. That’d be justice. I shouldn’t trouble.”
The last glimmer of light sank in the sea. A woman’s voice burst out in high song on the plateau.
Yannul stirred uneasily. He said to Raldnor, very low: “They’re hard bitches, most of them, they can take care of themselves. But there was a little girl—from Alisaar, I think—a Zakorian pirate took her when she was a mite. She was tough on deck, but she got scared at night. There may be too much fun up there. Would you object if I went up and got her back?”
“Your gallantry does you credit. But the getting may be slightly harder than you suppose. I’ll go with you. Two soldiers from Ryhgon’s school should be a match for twenty or so drunken Zakorians.”
They sidled away from the group on the beach and abruptly took to the indigo channels of the forest.
• • •
It began in a sort of grim humorousness, that climb through the jungle. It eased the tension in both of them, brought back certain pleasant memories of conspiracies at Lin Abissa. Yet, as they moved steadily upward, the presence of the forest began to steal on them, to overpower them with its flat, dark essence.
The gut of the jungle was all shadow, with edges of icy blue where the moon tipped its leaves. It purred and rustled and throbbed. Those small numerous eyes that had ignited below at the edge of the beach winked like stars in the undergrowth. The grasses crackled with the flame of unfelt winds.
“Spies everywhere,” Yannul whispered.
But neither of them smiled. To Raldnor it seemed the whole forest pressed close, all of it animate, watching, hostile. He felt for the first time the coldness of the shadows that were not cold in any physical sense, the oppression, the almost psychic smells of age, of something ripening on its own rottenness. The island, quiescent by day, stirring at nightfall, had breathed into its own dark life and found itself penetrated and deflowered. They had disturbed its primeval dusk. It hated them.
The plateau leaped abruptly into orange nearness through tall fern.
On the bald rock men and their whores shouted and sang, eating their fill and drinking from the broached barrels. A great bonfire flapped its skirt at the sky. Two or three women were dancing naked, holding burning twigs in their hands in imitation of the fire-dancers of Zarduk.
“Do you see your girl?” Raldnor asked.
“No. We’ll have to move closer.”
A few steps more and a female figure jumped up.
“Yanl of the Lans—and Ralnar,” she slurred, immediately knowing them both, particularly Yannul, but she was not the one Yannul sought. She led them to the fire, nevertheless, and gave them beer, and wound her arms about Yannul. At this, a man came staggering up, his eyes bloodshot.
“You’re with me, Hanot. Don’t waste your time on that landsdog. Jurl’ll want to know you’ve seen fit to join us, masters,” he jeered and careened off, dragging the woman with him.
“There she is, little Rella or Rilka, I forget her name,” Yannul said, “and having trouble, too.”
He ran toward a disturbance in the shadows, with Raldnor following. They pulled up four sailors and dealt with them swiftly. Yannul half-lifted a struggling, clawing girl, and convinced her, at the cost of almost losing his eyes, that he was not part of the prolonged rape which had been planned, but Yannul, to whom she had told her secret fears in the dark. She was small-boned, with a fine straight profile uncommon among Zakorians. She might indeed have been an Alisaarian. She smiled at him uncertainly, but her trust quickly gave way to a look of pure fright.
“Well, so we’re to be honored after all,” Jurl’s voice said behind them. “The dogs have come to fill their bellies.”
“Back to back for the fight,” Raldnor said to Yannul, “like the training floor at Abissa.” He found a savage grin on his face. “But first an appetizer. This man’s Ryhgon’s breed, and we both have a score to settle with him.”
He could not make out Jurl’s face against the fire. It did not matter. A sudden seething and intolerable hate came on him. He knew abruptly that it did not belong to him, but had filled him like an empty vessel. Hatred—the island was alive with it. It crawled in his blood, in his brain.
He felt the dead places of his mind tear open in a swift, unlooked-for agony. Not Anici or Astaris to enter them now—no sweet woman with thoughts like splintering crystal, no otherself all warm fire. Not now. This was an alien, a dreadful and unstoppable thing. A possession. He felt the entity collect itself, focusing through the jungle’s purple eye, yet seeking expression incredibly through his own. He felt something break out of him. It was horror and fear. But it made him grin and laugh in an impossible madman’s triumph.
Jurl suddenly shuddered and clutched at his throat, his belly. A sharp cry burst from his mouth. He fell and screamed and clawed, and rolled into the fire.
All around them panic dropped on the feasters. They grew silent, heads raised like the heads of animals snuffing the wind, tensed for the first feeling of pain.
It came swift, that retribution. They leaped and shrieked like demons in the glare of the flames, all caught in a pattern of terror and death.
Yannul said urgently to the girl: “Did you eat the fruit?”
“They gave me beer and fruit,” she whispered, her eyes wide, “but I hadn’t had food for three days. I sicked it up.”
“Good girl,” said Yannul, proud of her, his face very pale.
“There’s nothing we can do here,” Raldnor said.
He turned back into the trees, shaking like an old man after fever, and they followed him.
The forest was very silent as they made their way back through the shadows. No eyes opened. There was only the sound of the falls, the sea.
On the beach Tullut’s men sat huddled at their fire.
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“The fruit was poisonous, Tullut,” Yannul said, “in the end.”
His Alisaarian girl began to cry. He comforted her.
• • •
They slept by the fire. At dawn Tullut took two men with him to the plateau to see if any had been purged of the poison and still lived—as did Yannul’s girl. They came back inside the hour. They did not say what they had seen on the plateau; certainly no one returned with them.
They took what was left of the bird meat and barrels filled with fresh water and rowed for the ship. There was a full wind blowing—a warm, not an angry wind. It blew them out of sight of the island. They were glad enough. Ten men and one woman were all that remained to crew this tattered, burned hag-ship, once a beautiful thing, riding proud on the western seas. They were not enough to take her oars; they could only let the wind push them as it wished. They were all tired out, immobilized and drained by what had been done to them. Many days passed; they did not cut notches and lost count of them. Overhead the position of the stars was strange. There came a lull.
“I’m finished, Ralnar Am Dorthar,” Tullut said, addressing Raldnor by the name he had chosen to go by. “The food is gone, the wind’s stopped. This blue sea has no end. We’re becalmed in hell. The voyage was cursed from the beginning.”
“You took ill luck with you,” Raldnor said. “Don’t you say it’s bad fortune to carry a felon or a wanted man?”
“Oh, some sailors’ yarn. Most of our men were felons, Ralnar. They’ve paid for it, I think. There’s some talk among us—to make a death pact. It’s our custom. This is an arduous way to reach the gods.”
“There’s been too much death,” Raldnor said.
“I know it, Ralnar. Elon was my father—Did they tell you? He got me on a girl at Hanassor, only a Zastis mistake, but he saw me schooled, bought me my commission on this ship. This damned ship. I inherited too much of him. He was a good man, but it’s weakness in me.”
Raldnor said gently: “I guessed your grief, though you hid it very well. I, too, once held back grief so no one should see it. A man should have no shame in weeping.”
“No, Ralnar. But then our customs are different. How is it your hair turned white after the burning mountain? I’ve heard it happens from shock or fear, but you’re a brave man. You were braver than that bastard Jurl.”
