by Tanith Lee
The Lowland force was alive; he had seen them. They had razed Hetta Para and crossed the river, wiping out the small camp there with ease.
No trepidation or superstition had really prepared the Vis. It seemed unthinkable. The scum of the Serpent Woman had touched the soil of Dorthar with its feet, had drawn in lungfuls of her dragon air. Despite all hindrance and all probability, they had, at last, become all too real.
23.
KATHAOS SMILED AT HIS GUEST.
“I hope the wine is agreeable to you, Lord Mathon. A subtle vintage from Karmiss, which I fear may never produce grapes again. We must make the most of it.”
Mathon shivered and set aside the wine, which had the color and suddenly the taste of blood.
“Yes, this thing seems to have grown unstoppable.”
“That, my Lord Warden, is because inadequate steps were taken.”
“But a rabble, and so few of them—Ultimately they must fall before the strength of Dorthar’s arm,” Mathon concluded querulously.
“I am soothed to find that you think so, my lord.” Casually Kathaos added: “Had you heard? Two days ago some of the Sarite’s Vis troops rode east and sacked Kuma. As I ascertain, merely for provisions and exercise.”
“Kuma. The Queen’s birthplace.”
“Indeed. A minor town yet a healthy one, and under the circumstance that it has produced royalty, worth repayment. But still, I believe, the Lord Amrek considers it unwise to meet the Lowlanders in battle.” These words were spoken without inflection, but Mathon twitched, sensing an awkward drift in the conversation.
“It’s near, then. Siege perhaps,” he muttered.
“Such a thing seems incredible. But yes, my lord, I think it may even come to that. I gather that several of our most notable citizens are making for Thaddra, and the dregs of the lower city are already gone. In addition we have the soldiery which Yl Am Zakoris has so kindly loaned us, kicking its heels at every corner. Soldiers become bored with inaction and pick quarrels. They also eat a good deal.”
“I’m certain, Lord Councilor, that Amrek will move when the time is right . . .” Mathon said uneasily.
Kathaos smiled at him again.
“Indeed yes. Besides, we have our own garrison, do we not?”
Mathon balked at this hint of Kren. He made some excuse about his duties and rose. He thought: “I am an old man. I cannot be expected to parry the thrusts of this intriguer. What does he want me to do? Very well, so he has saved us from the pirates by strategy, and is more clever than Amrek. Can I make him King of Dorthar? He has the Council already in ferment. Ah, why cannot Amrek rouse himself?”
• • •
In the taverns where they had been billeted, Yl’s mercenaries boasted and swore, picked their teeth and spat out wine that was not to their liking. Occasionally they would clash with Amrek’s soldiers, churning the byways into arenas of dust and blood. Their commanders agitated at the palace, seeking an audience with the Storm Lord. The streets became rowdy and unsafe after twilight. A well-born girl of twelve was raped near the river bank in the upper city by a Zakorian captain, and the matter hastily smothered. Dorthar had no wish to insult her benefactor, Yl, by a public whipping.
The great brazen heat of the warm months became unbearable. The sky pulsed like a tautened skin; clouds painted on it in white ink never moved. The Okris withered and shrank in its margin, sucked dry, showing its stagnant dirt now, and the harvest of garbage and discarded furniture thrown in by the people. A stench rose from the low water, and river things crawled up the mud and died on the paving at the top. Slaves were sent to clear the wreckage before the rotting plates and bedclothes bred an infection.
The priests in the temples raised their arms, spilling the blood of black bulls and pale birds. Rolling in trances, they declared that the drought was a sign of coming thunder. The Storm gods were preparing to strike the Lowlander down.
Crops burnt up in the fields like tinder. Slaves took their meager possessions in the night and fled to Thaddra, though sometimes their masters caught up with them. All along the white road leading through the plain before Koramvis, men and women were hung on poles to die.
Koramvis, the thinking jewel, the heart-brain, had become a refuse pit of dying things and their decay.
In the last month of Zastis a scarlet signal shot from the watchtower on the plain.
A man in Kathaos’s livery rode through the shouting streets.
At the gate of Kathaos’s villa a crowd of supplicants had gathered, pleading for his aid, shrieking for transport with which to abandon the city. Guards stood massed, keeping the hordes back with a hedge of spears. Men in despair beat their fists against the wall. The rider forced his way into the courtyard, flung himself down and ran in through the high doorway.
Kathaos met him in the striped shadows of a colonnade, and his face, for once, was as fierce as a leopard’s. Beyond a filmy curtain, the messenger made out a woman standing with her hands pressed to her mouth.
“Well?”
“My lord, they’re half a day’s march from us.”
“And Amrek—”
“—is sick, my lord, unable to leave his bed.”
Kathaos nodded, turned without a word and thrust aside the curtain with his hand. Lyki stared up at him. The paint on her eyes and lips was too vivid, for she was suddenly very pale.
• • •
Into the small room where he sat the dusk came crowding, full of shadows and unheard sounds. It filled the corners and swirled about the chair like the sea. Beyond the high window only the mountains showed—vast looming blocks, with the color and apparent substance of the tinted sky.
“You are ours,” the mountains said to him. “The son of our mornings, conceived beneath the shade of our bones. Come up, come with the dark. We will conceal you and keep you safe.”
“No,” Amrek said aloud. The noises and flickerings of the dusk flurried and resettled. “No. I am a king. My penance for that is that I must grapple with devils tomorrow, with the firstborn of the Lowland serpent-witch. Yes, I’ve sent them word that we fight, that I’ll lead them. And I’m afraid, afraid, afraid. And I can’t keep from thinking it: Here is my doom, my destiny. A coward. Yes. What else? Last of the line of Rarnammon, and I have no son to follow me. Wait, Raldnor. Hold off until I’ve had time to marry and get myself a boy on her.”
Amrek laughed softly. He shut his eyes. The room was suddenly full of a dark garden and the scent of trees. A voice at his elbow said to him: “One day, my lord, long after you’ve seen me dangle on a gallows, a man may slip a knife in your back or a powder in your cup, which I, had I been there, would have prevented. I can deal with my enemies, my lord, if I live. And yours, too.”
“Well, Raldnor,” Amrek said aloud. “Well. The enemy is at the gate, the men with their knives. How will you defend me?”
• • •
At the brink of the plain below Koramvis, Raldnor’s army made its camp in the twilight.
Red smoke still floated in the still air over the watchtower, a mile away down the valley. A road began among the burned-out orchards and wound off toward the elevation of the lower hills and the distant, silhouetted diadem of towers that was the city. There were no lights on the plain, but they had made out that marching line of poles where slaves had been hung, rotting in the fire of day.
There was a great silence on the camp. The Lowlanders moved as ever in their passive unemotional way; over the Lans, Elyrians, Xarabians and those of mixed blood a vast quiet had descended. Until now they had ridden on an adventure—with a stirring of the soul, with luck and trickery, with a chance, also, to turn back. Now, confronted by this ultimate symbol, Koramvis, they sensed what they had done, and they, like the Dortharians, were numbed by it. They had reached a supreme, an unthinkable goal. And thereby given it power to destroy them.
Koramvis, the bea
utiful and the strong.
Yannul, as he honed the blades of long swords in the glare of crackling flames, visualized the wide gates opening in the new day, spilling the might of Dorthar.
“They were waiting, lazy, letting us come to them for the plucking,” he thought. “There should have been help from Shansar and Vathcri with us, Tarabine men marching over those mountains to take the Dragons from the back. But a traitor ran to Koramvis, and now no other man will come. Death in the morning. A few hours away. Gone beneath the hooves and the chariot wheels. Made into dung to fertilize their blighted fields, carrion for their birds to eat. Oh, creamy-breasted Anack of the Plains, why bring a man so far to die?”
Yannul glanced about. A Lowlander was at his shoulder.
“Come,” he said.
“Come where, and for what?”
The Lowland man pointed. Men were leaving their fires. Lans and Xarabians, leaving their women and the spoils they had snatched from Kuma, moving up beyond a line of orchard trees, out of sight.
“What’s up there?” Yannul asked, his scalp unaccountably prickling.
“We go to pray.”
“To pray—ah, no. I’ll spend my last night alive in other sports, many thanks.”
The Lowlander said no more and walked away after the others. Yannul turned back to the pile of weapons.
The crackle of the fire became very loud. The sky darkened, and the last flush of flame on and over the mountains guttered out.
Yannul’s back began to crawl. He slung down a sword with a curse, got up and stared about. Even the women had gone now. Only an empty slope remained, dotted with little fires.
He went up after them, in among the trees. In the dark, men stood in a union of vast soundlessness.
“Pray,” Yannul thought, “to what? To Anack?”
Then he felt the curious whisper in his brain.
He started. Could they invade Vis thoughts now? But no, this was something different—an awareness only of the humming intensity all about.
Will. Why call it prayer? Prayer was their instrument; they used it like cloth to fashion a garment, like the stone he had used to sharpen blades.
“Well, I, too, can will to live out tomorrow.”
It seemed quite natural then, the linking of his consciousness with those about him, in a common cause of self-preservation, though the air sizzled and thrummed as if before a storm.
• • •
Under the torch-lit gate of Koramvis, a covered carriage rolled toward the valley plain.
Within the musty dark, Lyki snapped shut her eyes. All this, she knew, was a game to Kathaos—more fascinating in the irony and skill than in likelihood of success. She gnawed her lip in a sudden extremity of fright. “May the gods damn him!” She felt her heart twisting in on its own raw blackness of anger and fear.
When she opened her eyes again, she saw Ras on the wooden seat opposite her. His face was like white enamel, and she wondered if he could see hers as well, for the darkness of her skin.
“Why are you doing this, Lowlander?” She had tried to keep all pleading out of her voice, but her tone betrayed her. At first she thought he would not answer, but then he said, quite gently: “I hate him. I hate Raldnor.”
“Do you hate me too?”
“You?” He stared at her as if seeing her for the first time.
“If we do what Kathaos wants, I’ll die. They’ll kill me.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said, but there was no malice in his voice.
“What about the child? The child will die too.”
“Raldnor’s child.”
In a sudden gesture of defense, Lyki drew the child close to her, shielding it with her arms. She had carried it inside her and labored harder to bear it than she had previously labored at anything, and now a man who knew nothing of pregnancy or birth brushed away its little span of days as lightly as a feather. She looked down at its swarthy dreaming face, the black curls like wisps of fern clustering on its broad, low forehead. They had given it a medicine to make it sleep, to shut its strange, accusing eyes, and muffle its demanding mouth. She bowed her head over it, absorbed once more in her own bitterness.
Many years before, another court woman, whose name had been Lomandra, had come this way, down this pale road, from Koramvis, carrying a child in her lap.
Almost an hour passed, marked by the faint creaking of the carriage, the uncertain rumble of the wheels as they left the road and took to the hilly paths between the cibba groves and drought-blasted fruit trees.
At last the carriage came to a halt, and the silences of the plain gathered around them. Their driver jumped into the grass, dragged back the curtains and stood waiting. He put out his hand to Lyki to help her, and his mouth was crooked with contempt. She longed to spit her venom into his face. She thrust off his hand and pulled her mantle about her until it hid both her and the child. Beyond the trees she saw the red suggestion of firelight. Suddenly her limbs seemed to dissolve and she felt as weak as if death had brushed her—but not from fear alone.
The Lowlander took her arm—a casual, deadly touch. They began to walk.
At first the enemy camp seemed deserted. No movement or sound emanated from it. Then came a sudden burst of singing over the slope, and hands clapped in a Xarabian dance, and there was laughter.
She marveled at their confidence on this eve of death.
Suddenly there was a guard silhouetted in front of them against the fire haze; he was carving a stick with his knife.
“Who’s there?”
“Peace, friend.” Light slanted on Ras’s hair. The Lan relaxed, showed his teeth and stood aside for them. He winked at Lyki’s averted face.
“As good a way as any to wait for a battle.”
Irrationally, Lyki felt fury seize her, because the sentry imagined that she had given herself to this thin pocked man. Then the camp was all around them. There was the smell of food cooking, and steam rose from iron caldrons slung over countless fires. It was now a place of dimly seen movement, vaguely heard voices, smoke going up, animals cropping turf at their pickets, everything blurred together by the smearing flame light.
No one spoke to them.
At the head of one of the tent lanes, a deserted fire was burning in a circle of stones. Cibbas grew thickly here, casting a dense shadow. Ras went to the hearth and seated himself. Meat bones lay whitely in the grass, and scraps of bread from a finished meal. All around the camp, the orchards and vineyards ran in seared acres under the blistering stars. Lyki thought for an instant she might slip away when Ras took his cold eyes from her. Yet she knew that he would never look away, would never allow himself to be distracted.
“Why do we wait?” she asked eventually.
“There will be men in the tent with him—Yannul the Lan, and the Xarabian; some of my people, maybe. When they leave him, I shall see them go.”
She looked about them for some Commander’s pavilion, but all the tents were the same.
“Which is his tent?” she whispered.
“There.”
Her heart stabbed and she shivered in the boiling night.
When the flap was opened, yellow light spilled out, shocking her. Men moved away across the camp, two of them laughing together.
Ras got up.
“Come now.”
Lyki stared at him. She clung to the child and found she could not move.
“Come.” He crossed to her and took her arm, pulling her slowly, without menace and without gentleness.
“There will be a guard,” Ras said softly. “Walk toward him, and I’ll take him from behind.”
She nodded dumbly. Stumbling, she began to make her way between the cibba trunks. She saw the guard now, a Lowlander, leaning on his spear impassively.
He caught sight of her at once.
“How c
an I help you?”
Lyki opened her lips, but her mind had emptied. She knew that her terror must be evident in every part of her. While she stood there helplessly, Ras came from the dark and felled the guard with a stone.
“There’s no one to stop you now,” she hissed at Ras. “Go into the pavilion and kill him, and let me go.”
He glanced up. His eyes were like the eyes of a banalik, scalding her with hate, and she knew her plea was useless.
“You must kill him,” he said, “as Kathaos intended.” He smiled, but without humor, probably without even realizing he did so. “He would never let me kill him. He would come into my mind and stop me. You must do it.”
“Oh, but he’s a sorcerer,” she snarled scornfully, trembling. “Can’t he look into my mind too?”
“You are Vis. Your minds are shuttered, even to Raldnor.”
She turned away and took the flap of the tent entrance abruptly in her hand, and it astonished her—the reality of the leather between her fingers. She held it open a little way and stepped through, and let the fold slap shut behind her.
There was only one man in the tent, reading beneath a lamp. He looked up slowly, without surprise, and the lamplight fell on his face.
She had not known how she would look at him, but she could not take her eyes away. She had not known if he would seem different to her, and she found him changed, utterly, yet indefinably the same. His sheer physical beauty she had remembered well, yet not well enough, it seemed, for now she was amazed by it. She found that she could not believe that this was the man with whom she had locked limbs, whose shoulders she had imprinted with the marks of her kisses, and her teeth and her nails. Those memories of passion which had tortured her through Zastis, became terrible, awesome in this drab tent, as though she boasted copulation with a god.
“Lyki,” he said.
“Yes,” she whispered, “I’m Lyki.” She pushed the hood back from her hair and the cloak from her shoulders. She wore a black dress, without ornament, and carried the child pressed against her, wrapped in a shawl. She raised this burden now and held it out to him mechanically. “I’ve brought you your son.”
