by Tanith Lee
Later, the councilors went away to discuss what should be their policy, and the boy talked seriously to Yannul, while the little girl Queen smiled serenely. His heart burst with absurd pride in them. When he was an old man, or even if he did not live to be one, this pair, full grown, would rule well in Lan.
“You must understand, Yannul,” the King said to him, “that if I were older, I would lead my people to fight for the Lowland King. But I know what they’ll say. They will say that not only Dorthar, but Zakoris and Alisaar hate the Lowlanders, and will also attack them; that Dorthar herself is our neighbor, separated from us only by a little stretch of water. She would turn to us and destroy us, and we have no army.”
“The Lowlanders have no army, but they’re making themselves one. They’ve had to.”
“Yes,” the King said. His eyes shone. “Many men will go from Lan to fight with them. I heard two or three on the stairs talking about it. Amrek isn’t loved here. The Queen thinks he’s a demon.”
The serene girl lowered her lids and giggled.
The policy was to be as the King had said, yet not harshly put. As to the passage of other-land ships along the western flank of Lan, no harm would be offered them. It was intimated, if not spoken, that men who rode to the Plains would go unabused. At supper in the hall, four young nobles came to Yannul and talked with him at length, with bright fierce eyes, of justice and struggle—at which the councilors never turned a hair. Questions were also asked of the Plains men who had ridden with him. Until now there had been a sort of restraint; yet the Lowlanders seemed strange and silent to the people of Lan. They did not question them overlong.
Once, in the indigo hills, Yannul and his brothers had boasted that they would eat at the King’s table. The memory smote him that day. Ringed by familiar things, he yearned to ride deeper into his country and be lost there for a while. But there was no time.
• • •
Three men rode to Xarabiss in the snow, to Xarar, where, eleven years before, a hot spring had erupted out of the earth. A new palace had been built to encompass the spring—a winter house where the king and his wives might warm themselves in the cold.
Thann Rashek, whose name in certain circles was still Thann the Fox, had been dozing by the ornate hearth, while two pretty girls played and sang eight-stringed melodies of Tyrai. He was an old man who liked beautiful things about him, professed himself indolent and appeared deceptively docile. When the man leaned to his ear and whispered his news, Thann Rashek’s eyes expanded, and he began to display symptoms of unnerving wakefulness.
The three cloaked figures entered the room and bowed simultaneously, like puppets.
“Lowlanders. How interesting,” Rashek remarked.
“We carry a letter from our King,” one of the men said.
Thann Rashek’s steward intercepted the paper and brought it to him. The wax bore no imprint. Rashek broke the seal and read. Presently he looked up.
“Your King has signed himself Raldnor Am Anackire. Does he claim to be the offspring of the Lady of Snakes?”
“It is a method by which all of us now make ourselves known. Our land has no name—therefore we claim our descent from Her.”
Rashek smiled.
“An elegant fancy. Poetic, yet apt.” His voice did not alter. “Does your King imagine I can defy Dorthar on his behalf? With my weak, my idle land?”
He had sent a similar message to Amrek regarding the Plains city: “Alas, my troops are indifferent: pleasure lovers and braggarts. They would not survive the snows.”
Amrek’s answer had been swift.
“Your open unhelpfulness angers us. We have not forgotten your previous words concerning the scouring of the Lowland filth out of Dorthar, neither your persistent trading in Lowland goods long after our edict forbade it. You will set your house in order, my lord, before the spring.”
The Lowland messenger seemed to read Thann Rashek’s mind. Perhaps this was even possible, for they read each other’s, did they not?
“You may be forced at last to engage in war with Dorthar, lord king.”
“So I may. But not before I’m forced, I think.”
“Then you will march against the Plains?”
“I?” Rashek smiled. “I was never a warlord, sir. And my land is a courtesan, willing only for luxury and love.”
“After the thaw, lord king,” the messenger said, “we ourselves move against Dorthar, and our way lies across Xarabiss.”
“I deny access to none. We are a hospitable and friendly people. No doubt you’ll find generosity here, particularly from our liberal women.”
The messenger bowed; so much had been implicit in the nonchalant words.
“One thing,” Thann Rashek said. “I’ve heard your King is the man from Sar—the lover of my granddaughter Astaris. Val Mala’s men had killed him, I thought.”
“He is the man, Lord Rashek. He did not die in Koramvis.”
“That’s very wry,” the Xarabian said. “Perhaps he will avenge, then, your King, the red-haired woman Amrek destroyed.”
But the Lowlander made him no answer.
He thought of Astaris when they were gone. She had been, of all beautiful things, the best. A strange, rare woman. And beyond the high windows the snow fell into the mouths of icy fountains, and he felt that coldness creep in his old man’s bones.
• • •
Before the third month of the snow had ended, the ruined city was full once again of Vis.
They came in chariots, wagons, carts, on zeebas and on foot, not for purposes of occupation, but out of fierce new loyalties to a barely known cause and a lesser-known people. Easygoing Lans, handsome Xarabians. Elyrians who proved withdrawn and mainly silent. It was a fever running in the lands to north and east. Even soldiers came—mercenaries from Xarar and Tyrai with their officers, carefully defacing their Xarabian insignia around the fires at night to save Thann Rashek’s name. Even the slurred accent of Corhl was heard about the streets, and in the encampment outside the walls, two itinerant Alisaarians who had found nothing to love at home. Also, for some reason more slowly, those of mixed blood returned, those men with light eyes and dark hair, and the blonde-haired, black-eyed women. They were perhaps more lonely then, seeing that King, who was like them, and yet had become so different. But the old suppressed pride, the frustrated angers welled in them. They were as ready for the struggle as any paid fighter of pure Xarabian blood or stargazing Elyrian.
The newcomers brought their own squabbles and problems. They stole each other’s cattle and zeebas and equipment. They composed their own individual ballads, too, and dreamed nostalgically of their homes, now they were no longer safe and dull in them.
It was a strange time, for already the forces of disruption were at work, and men felt that weird quickening, either in their bones or in their souls. Even so early, no single thing could stay quite as it had been. Soon everything would be altered, swept away; only in realignment and great change could anything remain.
• • •
In Koramvis, in the third month, the snow held like stone.
In this bitter weather, the Queen’s woman, Dathnat, her own face pinched and wooden, worked longer upon the Queen’s flesh with her creams. Val Mala, sensing in the snow an enemy, kept much to her apartments. She no longer wore the white unguent. In the harsh, pale light of the winter days her golden skin seemed brittle and papery. Nothing amused her.
“I begin to tell myself old tales, like an old woman,” she thought. “I. I.”
She had been thinking of Rehdon, not so much as a man, but as the personification of her disappointment in him. It was a sour taste in her mouth when she recalled how he had come to her father’s palace at Kuma.
Her father was the Guardian of the place, a small and unimportant merchant town with squat towers like squashed cakes. It lay in the path of one of R
ehdon’s progresses; otherwise, doubtless, he would never have considered entering it. Val Mala had hated Kuma, and she had hated her carefully preserved virginity. Her countless lovers did their best to serve her, in their own way, and after every Zastis her nurses came, with their prodding fingers, to ensure that matters had not gone too far. Such were the sexual customs of her house.
On the evening before Rehdon’s arrival, her women had chattered ceaselessly, hysterical with excitement. They had all manner of tales concerning him. Tales of his power and beauty, and burning eyes that could strip a woman literally quite naked—a magic thing which they had been assured he had once done. For the occasion of his visit, Val Mala had been made a dress of glassy stuff sewn all over with golden flowers, and her hair had been plaited in twenty stiff braids woven through with pearls.
The sun rose. The palace woke and grew frenzied with anticipation, and Val Mala, accompanied by thirteen ladies in matching gowns of blush-red silk, had been taken to the head of the city wall. From here, she was told, she might look down and throw flowers decorously to Rehdon’s chariot. She had been instructed in everything, but she waited at the wall, breathless in her anxiety that he should look up at her.
The long brazen river of men seemed to wind endlessly in through the gates of Kuma. At last she saw his vehicle, quite unmistakably ornate. She leaned forward and flung the blossoms from her hands, and called out to him—only his name, which was enough, as it turned out.
Above the hubbub, her clear high youthful voice had reached him, and he lifted his head and looked into her eyes. In those days Rehdon, though many years her senior, had been a giant—handsome, almost godlike, a magnificent product of his line. The sight of him struck her deliciously dumb. Her whole body ached for him with sudden wild longing.
Later, she lay in the dark, watching the lights of passing sentries quiver on the domed ceiling, and she imagined, with uncontrollable intensity, the ecstatic delight she might feel at Rehdon’s hands if he took her as his wife. She vowed to herself that if she could make him desire her enough, he would marry her, and take her from dreary and provincial Kuma to the splendor of Koramvis and the agonizing rapture of his bed.
It became plain to her, in the days that followed, that Rehdon was fascinated. He could not keep his eyes away from her and would stare at her for long spaces of time, during which she affected not to notice his scrutiny. At last she contrived to be alone with him, in a marble chamber where stood the ill-carved statues of her ancestors, and where no servants, who had made their own analysis of the situation, would dare to intrude.
“Ah, my lord,” she had sighed, “how beautiful Koramvis must be. How you must long to return to her.”
As always, his eyes hung on her face and body, and when she went forward to him, he caught her hands in his.
“Would you like to see Koramvis, Val Mala?”
“Yes,” she whispered, “oh, yes, my lord.”
He slipped his arms about her.
“You’re no more than a child, Val Mala.”
She pressed herself against him.
“I long that you’ll teach me to be otherwise, my lord.”
He could have had her there and then. There was money enough to recompense for her defloration. But her extreme beauty had ensnared him, and her trust, which was really her unthinking foolishness. In some ways he was a sentimentalist, and in the matter of women and his reaction to them, his understanding was limited.
So seduced was Rehdon that he married her, and set her higher than his previous consorts. In the wonderful white palace, at the feet of the Dragon Comb of Dorthar, he lavished a million gifts on her, but her marriage to him destroyed her expectations.
In the great, gold-embroidered bed, he had hammered himself into her, but such was Val Mala that the pain pleased her more than anything else he might have done. She had endured so long the arts of love without their culmination that agony was a delight in itself. When it was finished, she must have more of it. It was her avidity that frightened him. Rehdon was not a master; for all his mass, he preferred to be the seduced rather than the seducer, which was the reason for her success with him in the first place. Now he taught an unwilling pupil the role she must play, and taught her to hate and despise him in so doing. Despite all this, she was adept and skillful, and he grew to rely upon her. Presently she became his chief Queen.
It was ten months after their marriage that she began to withdraw her favors from him. When he craved her the most, she proved the most evasive. She forced him to cringe for the benefit of her body; she made him fearful, taking a wicked pleasure in the enterprise, all the time hating him the more because he succumbed to her whims. She was a child of fourteen, he a man and a king. She longed for him to silence her, take her and use her, although she did not truly understand these desires.
At last she turned from him to the riches her position offered—to the temptation of power, and to lovers, the most ingenious of whom was Amnorh. He proved very useful to her, not least as an assassin. But the best-loved was Orhn Am Alisaar, for he treated her as a whore and so, in some curious and appropriate way, fulfilled her utterly.
• • •
In the fourth month the snow was cracked like marble by the rain. Nine days later, under yellow plumes of rain-cloud, an army rode out of Koramvis with all the paraphernalia of war.
Atull of Yllum had been picked to lead it—a Dragon Lord formerly in command of one of the mountain strongholds set up on the borders of Thaddra. He was a man of some experience, tough and forthright, well used to fighting, yet in reputation obscure. To deal with a peasant rabble in the Lowlands he was the ideal choice.
That Amrek should lead the punitive force was barely considered. No king was required to swat this fly. This was as well, perhaps, for Amrek had been often ill (something seldom alluded to), and his rulings indecisive. It had seemed to some that he would have been afraid to return to the Plains. Was it the old shame, the cuckolding that made him sweat? Or did he believe the tales of Lowland magic and dread the lingering curse of the Plains woman Ashne’e? Believe that the Lowland King was indeed his father’s son?
Amrek, as he stood on the great stairway to watch them go, felt a nameless horror and despair whisper in his core. “I am impotent before a ghost,” he thought. He glanced at the woman behind him.
“Well, Mother, our brave captain rides out.”
“We shall pray to the gods,” she said without inflection.
“You think Atull will fail,” he said to her, coming close. The faintest of lines were etched on her forehead, which troubled and pleased him. “Have no hopes the Lowlanders will ultimately kill me.”
She turned her head.
She remembered Raldnor, and she remembered the fair-haired woman who had sent the snake to her in Rehdon’s tomb.
“Did I mistake death a second time?” She thought of the grave in the River Garrison. No. She would not have them unearth whatever lay there. She no longer wished to know, for if she had lost him yet again. . . . Lamps burned softly through the nights in her bedchamber. She had begun to fear the dark.
• • •
Atull’s force moved across Ommos. The Ommos had taken to throwing yellow-haired dolls made of rags into the fire bellies of their Zarok gods. The sky blew and thundered.
When they crossed into Xarabiss, countless mishaps befell the march. Wheels ran loose, trees crashed in their path. Between Abissa and Tyrai, as they bridged a river, now rain-swelled and foaming, the timbers gave under them. Chariots, men and animals floundered and were swept away. At night came disturbances in the camp; running figures made off into the hills. Supplies were pilfered, beasts unshod. There was frequently some burning tent, blowing its ashes down the wind.
Atull sent his dispatches home. Word came shortly to Thann Rashek: “Your people hinder us. Prevent them.”
Thann Rashek’s reply was very cour
teous. Xarabiss had suffered a hard winter, and a poor harvest before it, and hunger had inflamed her robber population. If Rashek knew a means to govern bandits, he would be a happy man; he entreated the Storm Lord to instruct him how it might be done.
Atull’s command reached Sar, under beating heavy rains, and found the place in uproar. The Sarish watchtower had sent up a scarlet signal half an hour before. At dawn goatherds had spotted a force moving northward on the Plains.
The population of Sar was afraid, both of Atull’s soldiers and the Lowlanders. They began to evacuate the town in droves, burdened with crying babies and bleating domestic animals. Even if the stories were true, they were sure that Raldnor, for all he had claimed himself one of her sons, would not spare Sar.
The dragons advanced on to the Plains and crossed the border in the late afternoon. They saw no signs of an army on the march, rabble or otherwise.
“Those herders were drunk, or asleep and dreaming,” one of Atull’s captains remarked. “My guess is the rats are still skulking in their ruin.”
As dusk fell, they made camp on the banks of a narrow watercourse, where a small wood provided some shelter from the rain. Soon the dark was jeweled by their cook fires. Sentries prowled on the perimeter. They were not uneasy. They expected nothing.
Just before dawn, a sentry on the western rim of the encampment heard a movement in the dripping brush and went to investigate. He did not return.
“Fire!”
The yell burst across the tent lanes. Men sprang up, cursing and coughing; animals screamed and kicked at their pickets, broke free and ran, lathering with fear. The rain had eased in the night, but there was little dry enough for a blaze to take hold of. Nevertheless, the waterlogged undergrowth smoldered and stank. A thick, choking flame-fog enveloped the camp.
Atull pushed from his tent, his eyes weeping. There was no hope of orderly retreat. Men and animals burst from the wood.
Beyond the trees, back-lit by the first white rays of the sun, unexpected figures materialized. Swords clanged with a dull iron sound, spears sung. The Dortharians, who had looked for nothing in their pride and ill-fated assumptions, were cut to pieces as they erupted in confusion from the smothering trap. The enemy were half their strength in number and, by comparison, indifferently armed. Smoke and surprise, however, turned the balance. There was an absurd and bloody slaughter. Atull himself, fell heavily, an obscenity on his lips, a Plains man’s shaft in his guts.
