by Tanith Lee
“Rest easy, Sorm my husband. The omen was not your death.”
“What then, for Ashkar’s sake?”
“There’s change coming. The wind brought it. We must neither resist nor sorrow; both are superfluous and quite futile.”
“Change for the worse?”
“Simply change,” she said and kissed his face.
Sorm loved his wife and trusted her. He was neither weak nor unmasculine, yet in things spiritual, he leaned on her. From a child she had possessed aptitude and could speak within to most who were willing. In adolescence she had gone to live a year with the forest people, since when she had eaten no meat and shown particular cleverness in healing, both physical and of the mind. He himself had seen her somehow communing with a lion in the yellow hills above Vardath, while drawn knife in hand he trembled in every limb with terror for her. The snakes in the temple pit she called her children, and they wound like bracelets round her wrists and throat, and snuggled in her hair.
The Vathcrian riders came ten days after the tree fell.
Sorm asked, as others had similarly been moved to ask: “Who is this man?”
Ezlian seemed puzzled, searching inside herself. Presently she said: “There is a Vardish fable of a man born of a serpent, a hero. His name was Raldanash. He had dark skin, pale hair. The legend says his eyes were like Her eyes.”
“Yes, priestess,” the Vathcrian said, using the title generally considered to be more important than queen, “this man is dark, and very fair. His eyes burn.”
“Is he then some sort of god?” Sorm said, his mouth dry as ash.
“We must go to Pellea and find out,” said Ezlian. Then smiling in her way, she added: “But naturally, it’s as my lord wishes.”
• • •
In Shansar no wind came.
Mountains divided it from the fertile plains and forests of the south, and mountains thrust up inside it. There was a great deal of water in Shansar; it was a land of rivers and lakes and marsh, with the great rock stacks and steeples jutting in marching lines across it, like jagged stepping stones discarded by giants. It had a hundred or more outlets to the sea. Jorahan, the Vathcrian scholar, who had lived out his old age in a little-known town of the south, had left maps to show these mostly unused ways. There were many kings in Shansar and many tribes. They built ships of necessity. Sometimes they sailed around the coasts to pirate in the south. They worshiped magic, but with them also only their holy men spoke within—or lovers, or families. They had a goddess. Her name was Ashara. She had a fish’s tail, and her arms were eight white cilia such as they occasionally discovered on lake creatures.
Three Vathcrians, one of whom was a guide, rode into the mountains, crossed an ancient pass, came down into Shansar and bartered for a long narrow boat. There was a fourth man with them, not a Vathcrian, a tall man with white hair. They deferred to him as to a king, but he had come to be his own messenger in these lands that answered to no call from the south. There was a hosting place here, too; Jorahan had marked it on his maps. It also had been unused for centuries; only tradition and superstition had seen to its upkeep.
They rowed up great stretches of pearly water, the stranger-king taking his turn with the Vathcrians under skies purple with heat. In villages, women washing clothes stared at their southern garments. Men challenged them.
“I am making for Ashara’s Breast,” the white-haired man told them. That was their name for the old meeting place. They let him go. They had certain antique ritualistic truce laws concerning men who sought Ashara’s Breast. Besides, the warriors who spoke to the white-haired one became convinced that he had reason and purpose. Long boats began to trail a mile or so behind the Vathcrian canoe, not in hostility but mainly out of a desire to witness whatever the white-haired man intended to do.
They reached the place at evening and climbed up its shaggy, moss-grown steeps. Despite its name, it was in no way like a breast, either of woman or goddess. Near the summit stood a ramshackle priests’ dwelling, which housed five or six old priests, stiff in their joints, yet with fierce, dangerous eyes for visitors. One stood in the path of the white-haired man. He held out his staff, then threw it down at the man’s feet. The staff convulsed and became a black serpent. The Vathcrians jumped back, cursing; the Shansarians, who had moved up the mount after them, made signs of religion and magic.
Raldnor looked in the old priest’s face. He said very quietly: “Is the child afraid of the limbs that bore him?”
He reached and took up the serpent, which sprang instantly straight in his hands. He held out to the priest a staff. The old man’s eyes watered. He said: “Do you claim, outlander, to be Her son?”
“How does a man reckon such things?” Raldnor said, looking into the old priest’s eyes. “It would be fairer to say my mother was Her daughter.”
“You blaspheme,” the priest said. He trembled. Then he shut his eyes and tottered. Raldnor gently took his arm to steady him.
“Now you know me,” Raldnor said.
The old priest whispered: “I have seen into his mind. He must have his way, whatever it is to be.”
A murmur went up, like the wind stirring.
“There is a beacon here which summons the kings of Shansar,” Raldnor said. “I have come to light it.”
They led him up to the top of the mount. There was a vast crater there, and in the crater one tall dead tree. None of them knew who had planted it; certainly it had lived long, before death. Its white wasted branches seemed to reach into the apex of the sky. Raldnor struck fire and let the fire have the tree. The flames ran up and up, springing out on the bony boughs. It appeared that the tree was abruptly, miraculously living and in scarlet blossom. Men muttered and fell silent. There had been a legend in Shansar of a change which would alter the world when a dead tree bore red flower.
Night came on, and the tree burned like a red spear dividing the night.
Then, the wind rose.
It blew in black and scarlet gusts. The smoke and the colored sparks filled the sky. For uncountable miles the beacon showed; for uncountable miles they smelled the smoke on the wind.
It was too ancient a sign, too magical a sign for a land that worshiped magic to ignore. Tribe spoke to tribe, forgetting feuds or caste. Kings met up in the barren black rocklands, or in the watery dawn of the lakes. They gathered, and they came toward the ancient place, toward the magnet of the burning tree. For a night which would see the firing of the tree in Ashara’s Breast had been itself a myth and a prophecy.
“How will he speak to them? What will he say?”
It was the third night on Ashara’s Breast. The three Vathcrians sat at their own separate fire, a little down the mount from the priests’ house. There were many fires on the mount that night, and below the mount fires spread out like a million ruby eyes across the dark plateau. Above, the tree still smoked. It had proved good timber.
“How many have come?” the Vathcrian asked again.
“She knows,” another answered. “Half the kings of Shansar, at least, and more on the river road, Url says. As to what he’ll say—he’s a King, and more than that. By Ashkar, I’d fight for him. It’s a fever in me; why, I don’t know. You feel it too, all Vathcri felt it before he was done with us. It’s a fever. They’ll all catch it, those tribal men down there.”
“I love him,” a man said.
Another man laughed and said something witty and crude, poking at the fire.
“No, not love that sits in the crotch, you damned midden-brain. Like love of the land, of the place you were born in, the thing you ache to get back to, the thing you’d fight to hold, die for your sons to keep it.”
“Ah, you romantic. No, it isn’t love I feel. But he wants justice—only that. And he’s a King’s son, yet hell take his turn with us in the mountains or on the boat—I value that in a man. He can lend his hand, yet lose not
hing of what he is. The old Kings were like that Besides—this land of black-haired men is rich and ripe for the taking, I’d say. They’ll see that too, those pirates below.”
Later, they rolled themselves in their blankets to sleep.
In the yellow dawn the priests burned incense. The kings came, powerful savage men, each with his two or three personal bodyguards, his eldest son, his magician. They crowded down into the crater, packed together. It was a good place for treachery, but here was no treachery; their laws had no room for it at such a time. The tree was almost done smoking.
Raldnor spoke to them; his voice carried to the edges of the crater, yet the voice was not merely in their ears. It spoke to each of them in their brains. They grew uneasy; the magicians chanted and made passes in the air. There was a humming of chants, like bees.
Then a silence came—gradually, a little at a time. There was a surge, like water bursting from the ground, swelling, filling the crater, spilling down the slope, to take in the rock, the plateau beneath. First one man, then another. Each had a chink, a crack in the adamantine crust which had submerged his mind. Each felt invasion at that chink, that crack, yet it came too swift for any fear. They felt in those moments neither greed nor pity, for he eclipsed their thoughts with his own. He made them, for those moments, himself. They saw his ambitions and his aims, his anguish, his passion and his power—all as if they had been their own. They felt grief and anger and great purpose. Then it was gone, fading like the color from the sky, like moisture in the heat.
There was talk and superstition after. They shouted among themselves and set their sorcerers to work. But the storm had come and gone. They provided an aftermath with no meaning.
“How can one man communicate with so many merely by use of his brain?” The Vathcrian, who had spoken of the pickings of Vis land, wondered, hushed, “Is he then a god? Look at them argue.”
“Let them. Their decision’s made. He made it. Beasts that run to the sea to drown themselves may discuss what they’re doing on the way, but the sea still has them.”
In the sanctuary the old priest sat with his serpent staff across his knees. He too, with all the rest, had felt the solitary brain command his own. But with his inner knowledge and the harsh training of his calling, he had seen, too, into the depths of Raldnor, known the past, the desolation, guilt and pain, now set aside forever, but marked indelibly, like deep scars.
“We ask: is he a god, that man?” the priest thought. “But lie is no longer anything we know to put a name to. He has found his soul but lost his self. Raldnor, or Raldanash in the myth. He said his mother was Her child—Yes, I saw her. She had Her face. And his Lowland race I saw so clearly in my mind when he conjured them. Across great seas, yet they worship Her—How can this be? A strange race, asleep now, but he will wake them. And he is theirs, an emanation of his people. No longer a man, but a collective being. Yes, that is what he is. Not king or god, but essence, expression.”
The staff twitched in his hands. He smiled but not enough to stretch his narrow mouth. He had practiced the illusion so often that now it seemed sealed in the wood. The staff believed itself a snake. This was how he explained the phenomenon.
Outside, the day gathered itself and fell away. He sensed them alter course and begin to persuade themselves to the direction they had already had chosen for them.
“But whatever he is, have we ever known such power?” the priest thought. “How can we contain it? At some time the fight will finish. Will he simply burn away then, like the magic tree? What then can turn him back into a man?”
• • •
Summer was descending from its golden summit at Pellea when the three kings came there with their households, and the lords of their holdings and their towns. They came for their several reasons, with their several curiosities, fears and impatience. They spoke with Jarred, and stared at the dark-haired man and the dark-haired women walking in their elegant Vathcrian clothes. It seemed the stranger, Raldnor, had taken his demands to barbaric Shansar, and had been gone two months of the Vathcrian calendar.
“You’ve lost him,” Klar said. “The sorcerers have eaten him up, and good riddance.”
Yet Jarred was not the youngster he recalled; here was poise now, and calm, alongside the good looks. Klar noticed, too, how Sulvian was.
“She fancies the stranger-King, whoever he is,” Klar mused. “She’ll cry if he doesn’t come back.”
Klar had been at Pellea two days when the sentries rode down from the hills. They had seen riders on the upper passes—Vathcrian livery and arms, a white-haired man at their head, at back some two hundred Shansars on skinny marsh horses. Klar concluded the stranger was bringing down an enemy force to overwhelm the civilized men of the south. He called for action, but got only one. Ezlian of Vardath laughed at him—not rudely but affectionately, which was worse. He dragged his own few men into shape. When the force appeared on the Pellean plain four days later, he rode out and challenged them. And then his skull seemed full of things—bright, amorphous, pleasing things. It was like some drug. Klar was reminded irresistibly of that brother he had mind-spoken with, and grit tormented his eyes. He pushed emotion from him and stared at the stranger.
“I see you’re all they said. You were well suited where you went—the land of magicians. And you’ve brought your brothers with you, by Ashkar.”
But he rode with Raldnor, side by side, into Pellea. Something had touched him, touched him in a deep way, yet he was soothed.
The assembly was formed in the morning.
The five Shansarian Kings who had come with Raldnor from the lakes sat ranked behind him, grim-faced. It was clear they had assumed their stand already. The Vathcrians had spoken of a vast communion, mind with mind, on the beacon place of Shansar, but if any were alarmed or welcomed that here, it did not come. Raldnor spoke to them as a prince, cleverly, and fairly. He made them see what was to be gained—but also what might be lost if ever men of the dark races found them, men more willing to make war than they.
“Not so much a mystic as you hoped,” Klar said, “eh, Lady Ezlian?”
“We have already had our omens,” she said. She had spoken with Raldnor a long while as they walked with Sulvian in the old ruined gardens of Pellea’s crumbling palace. Snakes and vermin had lurked everywhere, Klar supposed, but that would hardly have troubled those three.
At dusk the torches in the ancient hall were lit. Light flared on hollow eyes and silent faces.
“What you ask, Raldnor of Vis, is immeasurable,” Sorm of Vardath said. “Not merely in terms of battle or of supremacy. I ask you only what we lose when we bow utterly to you?”
Ezlian rose. She lightly placed her hand on Sorm’s shoulder.
“If you are to lose anything, my lord, then it’s already lost.”
Jarred also rose.
“I put my force of arms at disposal of your will, Raldnor, King. I pledge you here and now that your battle is mine.”
Sorm said: “This woman at my side speaks for me. Count me your captain, Raldnor, King.”
Klar glanced about. He caught suddenly the dark eye of the black-haired man seated at Raldnor’s right hand, the one they called Yannul.
“You,” Klar bawled, “what’ve you to say when this fellow traveler of yours takes us off to pillage your racial kin?”
“My sword arm is Raldnor’s,” the man said, “as will be the sword arms of several of my countrymen. None of us are kin to the Dortharians.”
“Then, damn you,” Klar said, “I’ll take my chance with the rest of you. That’s the best omen of all when wolf eats wolf and swears it’s jackal.”
• • •
In the dark Sulvian walked about the garden, where fireflies reflected in the stagnant pools. Beside a broken urn she paused, sensing the quiver in her thoughts, then turned and saw Jarred.
“You shouldn’t roam about u
nescorted,” he said.
“Oh, here it all seems very safe. So old and so peaceful. I’m glad that you spoke first with your mind to me.”
“I’m rusty. It will improve, I expect. Klar’s still planning his campaign with Urgil of Shansar, discussing Jorahan’s sea routes. The lower halls are in uproar. It seems they like each other because they can both hold their beer. We must start the levies. Odd that our men will fight so willingly.”
“You understand why,” she said.
“And you,” he said, “are you happy, my sister?”
“Happy?” The intermittent fireflies spangled her hair. “Happy, do you mean, because I shall be betrothed to him, married to him to seal the alliance between his land and ours? Happy, perhaps, that I resemble a woman he once loved?” Jarred was silent. She said: “Oh, I know he will be kind to me. I know he will give me pleasure—that I shall bear his child. Somehow I see all this. I see, too, that he can’t love me. It would be impossible. He is beyond love. I shall be the wife of a demon, as if in a story.”
“But,” Jarred said, “you love him.”
“Yes. Of course. I shall never love anyone else now. He made me into that other woman—Anici. He reincarnated her in my flesh. It wasn’t intended; it simply happened when I saw myself in his mind.”
“This is absurd,” Jarred said. “We’ll let go this match for Vathcri. Let him have one of Sorm’s daughters.”
“A child of eight years? No. He must leave his seed here in this land when he leaves it. I think that he will never come back. No, Jarred. I want to bear his child. It’s something, if not very much. Oh, this land,” she said. “She made us the last part of his journey—only a fragment, a means.”
The moon emerged, rising out of the foliage of a tree and opened the garden to its light.
