by Tanith Lee
But he had been mellower in the past decade, more concerned to be known for what he was, aristocrat and master. The old title of “Pirate-King,” which had made him merry years back, could now cause him to scowl and shout. He had married only with his own kind, and his few Vis mistresses bleached their hair and painted pale their flesh.
Entering the palace, they took their noise in with them. Feet tramped and weapons clanked; there was the barking of dogs and hissing of hunting kalinxes, and over all the uproar of men intent on enjoying themselves. Suthamun liked noise of almost any type. In the long and glittering hall, minstrels came running and strings and drums struck up.
Suthamun, in the midst of a bellowed laugh, broke off. His blond brows drew together.
Into the hall had walked Kesarh Am Xai, one of his guard at his back, a pair of matched black kalinxes stalking on leash before him.
Kesarh, cursed by the Vis blackness of his hair, had arrogantly seemed to make a feature of that black. His guard, of whom everyone knew there were far more than ten, wore dark mail on ceremonial occasions. He himself, as today, was most often seen in black clothing, relieved only by the fine pectoral on his breast showing in gold and scarlet the fire-lizard Am Xai had taken as his personal blazon. Amrek, the damned tyrant and genocide of Dorthar, had worn black, as if to flaunt his preference for his own race. And Kesarh—even the kalinxes were black. Also, of course, splendid. Where had the cash come from to purchase or breed such beasts? The mother had had little to leave him and the Shansarian father had not bothered.
Suthamun studied the kalinxes, their cold blue eyes spitting malice, but the hand on the leash ruling them utterly. They had run with the rest, and taken the first kill, working together, and separately from the pack, a thing one rarely saw. Suthamun had instantly wanted them, but to demand anything from this lesser prince would be uncouth, ungenerous. Somehow, Kesarh would make him sweat.
The King was very aware of Kesarh, and did not like him. For one so lowly to attract so much attention was in itself an indictment.
Kesarh had reached the end of the hall where his lord was standing among his brothers and favorites. A little attentive quietness had come with the prince, and it was all at once possible to hear the tune the musicians were playing. Kesarh looked full at the King, a leisurely, blank, immovable look, and then followed it with a short graceful bow.
The two kalinxes, stopped like stone on their plaited leash, laid flat their tufted ears. The vicious things had responded to the vicious mood of the king, and were now showing it off to everyone.
Suthamun laughed.
“The hunting was timely. Did you have pleasant sport, Kesarh?”
“Yes, my lord.” Kesarh smiled. They both spoke the tongue of Suthamun’s home, the current language of the Karmian court.
“Your cats there, they won you that.”
“True, my lord. Dortharian kalinxes are often the best.”
Suthamun stared at them greedily. By Ashara’s Amber Nipples, why should this nothing own such animals?
“Dortharian, eh? They must have strained your purse.”
Another smile.
“Somewhat, my lord. But they weren’t bought as an indulgence of myself. I wished to try them today, to see if they merited their praises. Since they do, I’d rejoice if I might present them to your majesty, as a gift.”
The crowd in the hall rustled, gave off a bird-flurry of little laughs, and then clapped.
It would have been ungenerous to demand. It would now be ungenerous to refuse.
Suthamun himself now smiled. He snapped his fingers and a groom ran to take the double leash from Kesarh. Trained to perfection, the cats made no demur, even their ears rose. They were led magnificently away. Suthamun steeled himself, went over to Kesarh and embraced him.
The court clapped again.
Vathcrian wine came, and Kesarh drank with the King and his brothers. Uhl leaned to Suthamun’s ear. The King nodded.
“I hadn’t forgotten. A day’s sport, an evening’s work. Gentlemen, follow me upstairs. You also, Am Xai. You can leave your guard here.”
Up the stair, they passed into one of the council rooms. Lamps were already alight. On a wall, in exquisite mosaic, was a map of the world, including the outlines of the second continent. The place names of all the mighty areas had been put in with gold, Shansar most prominently. Mosaic fish frisked in the seas between, and marine volcanoes bled cinnabar.
Suthamun strode directly to the map, and stood gazing at it. When he turned back his face was self-consciously kingly and portentous. He glanced quickly about at them all, as if to be sure they would not mock him. But none of them was such a fool. Even the arrogant Kesarh maintained that polite blankness which would alternate in such company with his polite smile or his polite solicitous frown of attention.
“Your sister rode for Ankabek today,” said the King.
“Yes, my lord.”
“We were pleased to grant her desire to devote her life to Ashara, the one true goddess.”
Kesarh bowed.
“Val Nardia was agleam with her gratitude. Sire.”
Suthamun checked, but the young man’s demeanor was faultless.
“And you,” said Suthamun, “what shall we do with you?”
“My King knows I am his own to order to anything.”
Suthamun flung one arm back toward the map.
“Zakoris,” said the King. “We remember, do we not, how my brother of Vardath took black Zakoris, and how Zakoris collapsed? And then, how the defeated lords of Zakoris made inroads on Thaddra. And there they roost around the north sea edges of Thaddra, and from there they make reavers-war on Dorthar. My brother of Dorthar, the King Raldanash son of Raldnor, has sent to warn me how his northern coasts are harried by these pirates. The guardians of the northeastern towns of Karmiss have also sent me word that so-called ‘Free Zakorian’ raiders have been sighted, and smoke on the beaches of Dorthar.”
Suthamun, Pirate-King, paid homage to his past neither with word nor gesture. Fifteen years ago, he himself might have found this funny.
“For the safety of Karmiss,” he now said weightily, “and to demonstrate my concern for the Storm Lord’s lands, I’ve been thinking to dispatch a force of men and ships to rout the pirates. I myself was in the sea battle at Karith when the Vis put light to the water and the waves rattled with the bones of yellow-haired men.”
It seemed his brothers recalled this, too. Their faces were set. The few Vis councilors who were in the chamber lowered their eyes.
Only Kesarh in his black did not look away, and so the King’s eyes met his at once.
“The captaincy of this force I mean to give into the hands of a man with youth and vigor on his side, a man not yet famous in Karmiss, but that through no failing on his part.” If this was sarcasm, the King did not stress it. “A Prince of the old royal house, with the blood of the goddess’ own people—Kesarh Am Xai, I offer this command to you. Do you take it?”
Kesarh showed nothing. He simply continued to meet the King’s eyes.
“You honor me, Sire.”
And the King shook his hand, while the haphazard council congratulated him heartily.
The stinging bees of Free Zakoris sailed in small swarms, but it was sure Suthamun would send an equally small portion of the Karmian fleet against them. It was, besides, a fleet soft from easy times, and mostly Visian, for mainly those Shansars who had wanted to remain under sail had gone home. Add to that unpreparedness and lack of size, indolent ship lords, then place in charge a prince without kudos and with no more experience of a sea-fight than the fire animal of his blazon, the salamander.
It could be phrased to look like an opportunity. It could also be an invitation to disgrace and death.
• • •
The long northern sunset was almost finished as the barge came from
the pink water and ground on the stony beach of Ankabek. There had been a delay after all, a zeeba casting a shoe, some hours spent in shining Ioli. But the barge had waited, of course, and the crossing was only a matter of hours, the sea all calm, and the mysterious island growing before them from the shadows and the light, so it almost seemed enchanted, blessed. As it was, indeed, must be.
Val Nardia stared toward it with a curious yearning, touched by the beauty of the portents, and the last aching sunglow on its heights.
Above the landing, a village spread along the slope. Men came toward the beach with torches, and with them a woman walking like a ghost as the twilight closed the world.
The court escort was already back in the barge, only the girl stayed fidgeting with the Princess’ belongings, suddenly bursting into tears and kissing Val Nardia’s hand. Val Nardia spoke quietly to her, a reassurance, but her awareness was fixed on the woman walking among the torches. Then she was near, and the servant girl dropped to her knees.
The woman was a Lowlander. There was no mistaking it. Her hair beneath a smoky veil was lighter than a morning sky. Out of her ice-white face her eyes shone, the gold of the torch flames.
She looked at Val Nardia with these eyes, and seemed to pierce her through with them. The Princess did not resist the gaze. She opened herself, eyes, brain, and soul, to it, and so felt no fear, only a great astonishment. Did the Lowland priestess read her mind? It was well. Let all the sin and sadness be known, and then there might come healing.
But the woman merely said, in a low, still voice, “We have expected you, lady.”
The sentence had all the courtesy of one who, being the child of the goddess, could afford to be gracious.
“And I,” said Val Nardia softly, “have longed to arrive.”
The priestess glanced at the torchbearers who now took up Val Nardia’s slight possessions. They walked back, past the village and up the slope.
The priestess went after them without another word, and Val Nardia followed her.
Behind them, the barge dwindled at the edge of the water.
Ahead the dark path darkened further among tall trees. Where the torchlight lit them, their leaves showed red: These were the sacred trees of the Lowland temple groves. Presently, too, the evening breeze began to wake a tinsel sound from among them where discs of thin whitish metal were hung from the boughs. It was an hour’s walk.
The temple of Ashara who was Ashkar who was Anackire stood at the island’s summit. Black stone on the black of night, its windows revealed no lamp, it had no ornament. Only in its size did it differ from the temples of the Plains. The upright slot of the door was very high. No one called to be let in, yet the black doors swung inwards. Beyond, a dull sheen of light was the only hint of the temple’s life.
The men with torches placed their burdens neatly just within the doors, then turned and filed away. They were Vis, or mixed-blood, Karmian with Shansar and Vathcrian, but they had been trained, or had grown, to other ways. They seemed barely human.
The priestess stood within the doorway now.
“You enter here,” she said, “the Sanctuary of the goddess. For all that seek Her, She waits. As, for those who do not seek Her, She is not.”
A note seemed to chime in Val Nardia’s heart; the music of the discs on the trees sounded all at once.
She went swiftly into the Sanctuary, and the doors, without apparent agency, swung shut behind her.
2.
THE CEREMONY WAS CONDUCTED on the wide raised terrace before the temple. The building had formerly housed the Karmian love goddess, Yasmais, but she had been cast down and chased away to the little shrines of the Pleasure City. Now the temple was Ashara’s, the watery Anackire. Her smaller image had been brought out and she balanced on her golden fish tail, her eight white arms outspread like rays.
The magician-priest of the King slit the throat of a white bull-calf. In Shansar they had always offered Her blood before a battle.
Above, the sky was clear and innocent, but the Star had already manifested there and at night blazed behind the moon. At this season, all things came to have a sexual underlay, even magic and religion, certainly the acts of war. And it was a bad time to fight, who did not know that? The fair men of the second continent claimed immunity from Zastis, but one noticed they did not seem quite indifferent and had grown less so, those that lived long in Vis. Only the pale people, the Lowlanders, the Amanackire, took no heat from the months of the Red Moon.
Rem shifted in his mail. Other men shifted, the crowd surged and whispered.
The priest cried out his prophecy of victory, and the Karmian cymbals clashed, and the crowd found release in a shout.
So much ceremonial, and so few ships. Three, to be exact. Three ships, undermanned, rowers on double-pay in their unwillingness, and half that in arrears until Kesarh himself had somehow found their wages. They were old ships, also, the cream of the Karmian fleet of thirty years ago, patched up and pretty and liable to take water. The captains were here, and would presently swagger to the harbor and embark. They would make sail around the coast toward the mouth of the straits. The Prince Am Xai and his twenty guard—he had admitted to keeping, shockingly, twice the number permitted him—would ride ahead and await this speck of fleet at Tjis, the town which had sent the latest report of Zakorian activity.
It was a farce, and this religious frill only made it worse.
Rem shifted again, and his new scars gave him a dry little pang, and he thought of Doriyos.
Rem, once called Rarmon, had been six days lying up after his lashing. The physician he had managed to bribe the merchant’s man to fetch, had tended him thoroughly, and he had healed very well and very fast. But sprawled hours long on his belly in the damp heat of the cellar storeroom, listening to the throb of the sea against the wall, he had been filled with a vague hatred for all things. Lyki came to visit him once or twice. She had not been friendly, but she had had the man bring him soup and beer and bread. Thankfully, the beer and the physician’s draughts sent him to sleep more and more often as the pain died down.
On the sixth day, Zastis was visible just before sunrise, a wicked blush. Rem had left the storeroom, used the functional bathing facilities of the merchant’s house, and looked for his mother. She was still in bed. The merchant would be home tomorrow, perhaps. Rem left two silver Karmian ankars for Lyki, lying amid the cheap jewels by her mirror. She would know what that meant.
On the street by the very gate, Rem met one of his fellow soldiers.
“I was sent to fetch you. Our Prince has been selected to murder Free Zakorians at Tjis. I, and you, are picked to die with him.”
They had laughed, and spat on the notion, and Rem had agreed to find himself at the palace by nightfall. It had given him an odd feeling, nevertheless, that Kesarh, having sent him to his whip-master, should next call him back to such specific service. Probably it meant nothing, Am Xai had simply stipulated a number, which in Rem’s case was nine, and the other nine Nines were for some reason unsuitable or elsewhere.
To go toward the Pleasure City was inevitable in any case, it was not merely the warrior’s death qualm pushing him toward the life-urge. By day, the area was less glamorous but, naturally, busy. A glorious tawdry glitter of sun and sequins shot from everywhere. Turning through a fancy little arch into the Ommos Quarter, he soon reached the House of Three Cries, deplored its name as ever, and knocked on the door.
The elderly Ommos, whom Rem always had the wish to throttle, let him in at once, having first peered round the door like a tortoise from its shell.
“Enter, enter, dear master. He is free. He has kept himself for you since the Star opened its eye, such is his love for you—”
Rem thrust a coin on the old villain and went up the endless twisting unclean stair. The contrast when, having knocked again, he opened the topmost door and stepped into the room, was very gr
eat. This airy chamber at the top of the house was clean and calm, and scented with the flowering shrubs Doriyos grew in two ceramic urns beneath the window. Doriyos himself was seated between them at work on mending one of the countless broken musical instruments he would collect, repair, play sweet-noted, and thereafter sell, or more often give away.
Seeing his guest, however, he grinned, put down the stringed oval and crossed the room. Reaching up, he kissed Rem lightly on the lips.
“I was told you keep yourself for me,” said Rem good-humoredly, “yet you allow anyone into the room.”
“I recognize your tread on the stair, hand upon the door.”
Doriyos was beautiful, pure Karmian, a skin like honey and eyes like black onyx, and with a bronze-copper tinting to enhance the fine dark hair. He dressed simply and ornamented sparely. The gold chain around his neck had come from Rem, in the not-so-distant days when Rem was yet a thief. But the gold drop in his ear was another’s gift.
Used to the healing pain, and in his physical eagerness, Rem forgot. Stripping, he heard the exclamation and wondered what had caused it.
“Your back. Who—”
“Oh. I fell foul of the Lord Kesarh. It’s nothing, almost better.”
“Nothing?”
“I should have thought, and warned you.”
“You should have told me. Who tended you?”
“A physician.”
“Whose?”
“I went to Lyki’s house. Probably a mistake. But she so enjoys being disgusted with me.”
“You should,” said Doriyos, so softly Rem stared at him, “have come to me.”
“You have. . . You might have been busy.”
Doriyos smiled. “What the old man downstairs says to you when you come here, when he tells you I love you, it isn’t a lie. I would have looked after you, and no one else would have come in.”
