by Tanith Lee
They reached the city on the afternoon of the third day: a strong-walled, high-towered pile built on an ancient manmade hill some eighty feet or so above the Plain. It did not have the beauty of a Vis city. There was something crouching and squat about it despite the towers. Vathcri it was called. Various houses and taverns sprawled down the hill and over the Plain beyond its walls, and there were soldiers about in the dark-blue livery they had seen in the towns. Despite this, discipline at the gate was lax. A polite answer to a brief challenge got them through. It was a Justice Day—a day when the king gave public audience, settled disputes and tried offenders in the open-air court before his palace.
“We have such things in Lan,” Yannul said, “and the Am Dorthar call us barbarians.”
The city seemed to rise in terraces toward its citadel, its winding streets clothed with crowds, wine sellers and pickpockets. Resha’s hood slipped away, and an excited babble went up. The girl stared haughtily about and stalked on, the crowd parting to gape at her. Yannul pushed back his own hood at that, and they moved more easily afterward. When they reached the audience place, the press was at its thickest.
“These peasants,” Resha hissed with profound contempt. “What King of Alisaar or Zakoris or Dorthar would demean himself by talking directly to a pack of clods?”
They got down steps and emerged in the bowl of the court. The palace which rose behind it pushed up tall spires, and painted friezes glowed on its red walls. Black shade trees had been planted where the King’s platform stood. The King himself sat in an ivory chair, before him were two kneeling supplicants, all around him the clutter of his court, advisors, clerks and military officers. Something caught Yannul’s eye—the banner held up behind the King’s chair.
“Raldnor,” he said, “do you see—?”
On the light-blue ground, an embroidery of a woman with ice-white skin and golden hair, a woman with eight serpentine arms, her body ending in the coiling rope of a serpent’s tail.
“Is that their King?” Resha asked superfluously.
“I imagine so,” Yannul answered, still staring at the banner.
“And that woman? Would she be his wife?”
Yannul looked again at the platform and saw the reason for her interest. The King was young and very handsome. To his right, a little behind him, half hidden by the drifts of tree shadow, sat a woman in a white robe. About to reply that this was most certainly the King’s favorite and only wife, to whom he had sworn forever to be faithful on pain of inexpressible divine torture, Yannul checked himself, for he saw abruptly that Raldnor was no longer with them. Yannul gazed about him, then swiftly ahead. Even in the blond crowd that salt-white hair was easy to discover.
“By the gods—he’s asking audience of their King.”
Taking Resha by the arm, the Lan pushed his way further forward until he stood at the very fringe of people, looking out across the flagged space at the handsome King. The two supplicants had moved off, one grinning, one sour, as was to be expected. Now a clerk hurried to the King, spoke to him and drew back. The King was frowning. His eyes skimmed over the crowd and found out Raldnor. The King said something. The clerk turned and beckoned.
Raldnor stepped out onto the open space and went forward. There was a burst of exclamations, then total silence. Even in this gathering of racial brothers Raldnor was remarkable. Without seeing his face, Yannul sensed again that incredible, almost physical, emanation of certainty and power.
“Kneel,” the clerk rapped out. In the stillness words carried well.
“In the land I come from,” Raldnor said, “one King does not kneel to another.” His voice was quiet and very level, yet there was not a man there who did not hear it.
The crowd murmured, then became quiet.
“So you claim royal birth,” the King said. “Of what city then are you King? Vardath and Tarabann, I believe, might dispute your rights.”
“There is a land beyond your seas, King. My rights are there.”
The young King smiled.
“Are you a dreamer, I wonder? Or are you mad?”
There was a deeper silence then. Standing behind Raldnor, unable to see his face or his eyes, Yannul nevertheless saw the effect they produced on the King, whose own eyes widened and flinched. His tanned face paled. He snarled through his teeth, midway between shock and anger: “You dare to try magicians’ tricks on me!” And to the clerk in fury: “Who is this man?”
The clerk whispered. The King again looked up; this time he made out Yannul and Resha. The King seemed unnerved. He stared at Raldnor.
“You say you come from another land, a land where there are dark-haired peoples. The man and the woman there—are they your proof?”
“I am my own proof, King. Read my brain. I open it to you.”
The King flinched a second time.
“Such things are for the priests of Ashkar. Do you ask to be examined by them?”
“My lord,” Raldnor said, “my kingdom is a small one. Men there resemble the men of Vathcri. But there is a black-haired tyrant who hates my people simply for their color. Every moment that is wasted between us sees the shadow of their persecution and anguish thrown farther.”
The King gave a violent cry. He leaped from his ivory chair. Guards ran to him. He thrust them aside. Even the white-gowned women started up in the shade.
“Don’t try to breach my mind with your own sick dreams!” the King shouted. The guards now ran to Raldnor; they came thrusting through the press and seized Yannul also, and the girl.
As the blue-liveried soldiers dragged the Lan across the court, he had one last glimpse of the Vathcrian King, and saw the fury and the terror on his face. Behind, the crowd milled in uproar.
• • •
The sands of twilight drifted on the floors of the red palace.
Jarred of Vathcri paced through them, up and down before the great hearth. He was a young king, very young. His father had died in early middle life, abruptly, and left him the ivory chair before he was ready for it. He had ruled half a year; now, confronted by the stranger, he saw it had not been enough.
“Who is this man?” he asked again. “Where does he come from?”
The pale-haired girl in the white dress sitting in the light of the one lamp in the room said gently: “Perhaps he is who he says he is, and comes from where he says he does. Shouldn’t you consider that eventuality, my brother?”
“Impossible,” Jarred snapped. Her demure, uncluttered wisdom angered him.
“Why impossible? There’s always been a legend of another land, a land of dark-haired men. And don’t you remember the maps of old Jorahan the Scholar—the sea routes that lead out of Shansar, in the north?”
“He breached my thoughts. In our father’s time that would have earned him death—to dare speak within to a king—and he did more. I couldn’t shut him out. He thrust aside the barriers—mind-spoke me against my will. How many men can do that?”
“Some of the priests,” she said.
“Some of the priests tell us they can,” Jarred sneered. “How many have you known do it?”
She said musingly: “It was said to be the greatest gift that Ashkar gave us—the ability to speak within. Now few of us use it, or could we use it if we wished?”
“You and I, Sulvian,” he said, “since childhood.”
“Oh, you and I. And we talk with our mouths at this very moment. No. Mind speech has become a hindrance to prosperity, because it’s hard to practice dishonesty when your thoughts are accessible, difficult to steal and murder and grow rich. Only the forest people mind-speak now, my brother. She must pity us.”
“Ashkar is honored daily in the temples of this and every other city. I doubt if she objects to that or to the gifts laid on her altars.”
“Who knows,” Sulvian murmured, “what a goddess would prefer to have from us. Our gold or
our integrity.”
The door opened. The High Priest of the order of the Vathcrian Ashkar entered—a thin, straight man in the dark robe of his calling, the violet Serpent’s Eye on his breast. He did not bow or in any manner prostrate himself, his status, in certain aesthetic and still recognized ways, being superior to the King’s.
“Well, Melash, you’ve come in time to rescue me from a lecture by my lady sister. She takes her duties as priestess too seriously.”
“I am delighted, King, that she does. We shall need Ashkar’s guidance in the days ahead.”
“What do you mean, Melash?”
“I mean, King, I have just come from questioning the stranger and his two companions as you asked.”
“And?”
“And, my King, he is all he says. And more.”
Jarred’s face whitened.
“You’re mistaken, Melash.”
“No, King, I am not. I discount the insult you render me in doubting my mental capabilities. I understand the stranger breached your mind and made you afraid.”
“Not afraid!” Jarred shouted.
“Yes, my King. No shame in that. He has made me also afraid. He has been very honest with us. He has shown me that before he reached our land, he had neither purpose nor direction; his mind was closed. Now the capacity of his mind is greater than any I have ever encountered or heard spoken of. And his purpose is likely to upset the balance of our world.”
“Well, tell me what he showed you. The whole story. Let’s see if it’s at all credible.”
Melash told him.
“You’re speaking like a fool, Melash,” Jarred cried when he was done. “Have you lost your reason? This is some romance made up in the bazaar.”
“No, King,” Melash said, “but if you are in doubt, you should question him yourself.”
“Then bring him,” Jarred said stonily.
Behind the priest the door immediately opened. The stranger came through, but only his white hair caught the little lamplight. The rest of him was shadow.
“Did you call him with your mind?” Jarred rasped.
“There was no need,” Melash said quietly. “He can read all our minds, whether we permit it or not.”
Jarred felt himself tremble, and stilled it. He retreated into the aura of the lamp, and sat down in the ivory chair, near Sulvian.
“What are you called, outlander?” he demanded in a dry, harsh voice.
“Raldnor, King.”
“Come here then, Raldnor. Where I can see you.”
The priest bowed his head and stood like an effigy, disclaiming without words the actions of his lord.
The stranger moved up the room. The lamp caught his face and his extraordinary eyes. The eyes fixed on Jarred.
“Melash, the High Priest of Ashkar, has told us everything you told him, Raldnor. I must congratulate your vivid and inventive imagination. You’ve missed nothing, even the goddess has been put in, Ashkar, who you claim to worship in this—other country of yours, under another name. Please tell me now what you hope to gain by such a fantastic mishmash?”
“Help for my people,” the stranger said. “I have learned of the other cities of the Plain, their river outlets and their ships. And there is Shansar in the north.”
“Don’t think you can make a fool of all of us,” Jarred spat at him.
Sulvian’s hand gripped suddenly on his arm.
“Listen.”
Outside a wind had risen; it moaned and sawed about the palace towers. Distant shutters banged in an irregular tempo. The priest raised his head. It was the dust wind of the Plains, but not the time for it. The room seemed suddenly full of omens.
Jarred shut his eyes, but already he saw, and the inner darkness was alive with pictures. He witnessed the smoking ruins, the slaves driven through the snow in chains and the wind blew among the yellow hair of the dead. It came too fast, he could not contain it. There was a black-haired man, with burning madman’s eyes—a man composed of hate and the desires of hate.
Beyond the palace walls the dust wind scoured down the winding streets of Vathcri. Men muttered, children woke and screamed in fright, women hurried to the temples. In the great pillared place of Ashkar, where it overlooked the sacred groves below, the serpents hissed and thrashed in their pit. A gust blew wide the shutters and doused the lamps on the altar. A cry of superstitious terror arose, and sleeping birds clouded up from their sanctuaries on the temple roofs.
Sulvian left her chair.
The lamp had smoked and flickered out, but in the darkness she could somehow find her way. She glimpsed Jarred huddled on the ivory seat and the gray-faced priest. But she saw the stranger, as clearly as if the lamp still burned, not on him but from inside his flesh, behind his eyes.
“You trap our city in a vise of fear,” she said. “Let go.”
“You trap yourselves,” he answered. “Are you afraid, Sulvian, priestess of Ashkar Anackire?”
“No,” she whispered. Then: “Yes. I saw myself dead in your mind. The Black King had killed me.”
“Not you,” he said, “though she resembled you.”
She saw herself abruptly in his brain; he showed her herself as he saw her: pale as pure light, her hair as white as his, yet blown by the wind into a tinsel of ice.
“Anici—” she said. “But there is another—”
“No longer,” he said. “Amrek, the Black King, has caused both their deaths.”
“You must hate him a great deal,” she whispered.
“I pity him.”
She heard the terrible power behind his voice, the thing so invincible that it could pity the enemy it would destroy.
“Did you call the wind?” she asked him.
“No. I am not a magician of Shansar.”
“But the wind came.”
“Yes, Sulvian. It came.”
“Jarred . . .” she said. “By the laws of the cities, you’ve challenged his rule as King.”
He said nothing.
Beyond the windows, the wind fell suddenly quiet. The horn of a gold moon pierced the tangled clouds.
• • •
In Tarabann of the Rock the wind came funneling from the southwest. Priests, as they stood on the high prayer-towers of Ashkar—raised up and built to resemble striking serpents—saw the wind coming like a long-tailed cloud, itself a python made of dust and storm.
It smote on Tarabann for two days and a night between. That night’s moon was dark blue as sapphire, the days’ sun the color of old blood. The waves reared up and flooded the salty flats that stretched out two miles from the Rock to the sea. Ships were wrecked and roofs blown off. The priests had different prayers to attend to. They smoked their incense and laid bare their minds, and became troubled. On the day after the wind dropped, the High Priest of Ashkar of the Rock came to Klar.
“It seems, lord, there is a new King in Vathcri.”
Klar, who was the King of Tarabann, who had fought at his father’s side in the last battle with Vathcri five years before, put down his gilded book.
“A new King, you say? What’s become of the young pup, Jarred?”
“He lives, King. You must understand that thought and things of the mind are as mist—we comprehend as best we may—”
“So you fumble at your tasks. I understand very well.”
“Indeed, King, you do not. There is a—power—in Vathcri. I have no other means to explain what I have felt. A vast power. Greater than the King’s. Not, I would judge, the power of a man. It has to do with the wind, yet is dissociated from the wind.”
“Riddles,” Klar snapped, snapping, too, the clasps of his book.
“Once gods walked on earth, King. So our fables tell us. Once She talked with men, like a kind sister.”
“You’re trying to say there’s a god walking about i
n Vathcri?”
“I would not pledge myself so far, lord, as to say such a thing.”
Klar was wary of the magic of the priests. He was two things: one was mostly merchant, the other all soldier, and neither had time for mysticism. The inner tongue had been dead in him since his brother—the only man with whom he could so speak—fell in the siege of a Vathcrian town. Nevertheless, he respected the priests, though he did not like their business to overlap into his own forthright and uncomplex world.
“Very well, sir,” he said, “I’ll send people to Vathcri. We’ll see what’s up, eh, old priest? Don’t fret. You did well to tell me.”
But Klar’s men were only away two days. On the third day they returned, and with them the six Vathcrians they had met on the road. They had a curious look about them, these Vathcrians. Klar could not gauge it. They brought a message not from the king, Jarred, though it bore his seal. Klar read it and looked up amazed.
“There is a man here, commits himself to paper, calls me brother in the manner of a king and bids me come inland to assembly in the Place of Kings at Pellea.”
“King,” the chief Vathcrian said, “that is the old place of assembly, used by our ancestors.”
“So it is, precisely,” Klar said, “but our ancestors, and not since. The last meeting there was a hundred, a hundred and fifty years past. By Ashkar! And is the rest of this correct: I must decide, along with the other Kings, whether or not to go to the aid of this Lowland country, never before heard of or seen?”
“Yes, King. Lord Jarred has sent men also to Vardath, and up into Shansar.”
“By Ashkar. I thought it was this Raldnor sent you, not Jarred.”
“They’re bound as brothers,” the Vathcrian said. “Raldnor also is royal, son of a High King and a priestess.” He did not look abashed, but rather, proud.
“Well, well,” Klar said. “Well, well.”
• • •
To blue-walled Vardath the wind came only for a night, stirring up the fishing boats on her broad river. A tree fell in the King’s garden. It had been planted at the hour of his birth, and the omen alarmed him. His wife, Ezlian, High Priestess of the Vardish Ashkar, went herself to the goddess, and returned to him in the dawn, pale, but smiling in a certain way she had.
