by Tanith Lee
Through a long window. Rem could look into the colonnade across the wide court below. Presently he saw Kesarh pass with the Prince-King. Emel was excited, giggling, his pale skin rosy.
Rem turned from the window with a grimace.
A few minutes later Kesarh entered, his darkness softened by the purple of Karmian mourning, worn for Suthamun as never for Val Nardia.
They went into an inner room.
As the doors closed, Kesarh altered. Rem recognized he was seeing the Prince’s private face, or some of it.
“Ankabek,” said Kesarh. “Do you remember, months ago?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Tell me again what you told me that night.”
“You didn’t credit it, my lord.”
“No. Tell me again.”
So Rem told him, more fully than before, of the priestess, what she had said to him, and what he had been shown.
Kesarh let him go all through it, watching him. The private face was still, and dangerous. Afraid?
Rem concluded. There was a gap. Then Kesarh walked to a chest, unlocked it, took a paper. Turning, he held out the paper to Rem.
“Read it.”
Rem did so.
“They sent—”
“A man. Anonymous. He came to my sergeant and left this with him. It seems he knew the proper channels. How?”
“Not from me, my lord.”
“No. I didn’t think it was from you.”
“It says—”
“It says my child will be born at sunrise, on the day of the Lion-Feast, Shansarian calendar.”
“Nine mornings from today.”
“It would take at least seven days to get there. If anyone was fool enough to travel such a distance in the snow.”
“Which gives a day or so in hand for your lordship to make suitable excuses.”
“Doesn’t it. Judged to within a hair’s breadth. They obviously expect me to go.”
Rem kept silent.
Kesarh poured himself wine, then drained the goblet straight down to the dregs. He had drunk from the jug rather in that way at Tjis, after the serpent. His back was to Rem now. He said, “I want you here. Awake and alert for anything. Raldnor can play with Istris awhile. I hope for his sake he doesn’t get a taste for it. The Warden will cover my place. You’ll set your men where and how you have to, to see everything is done in fair order. And to take note of anything I might not care for. Is this clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How fortunate you were once the strategist-leader of a promising little band of cutthroats.” Kesarh turned again, smiling at him with great charm. “And how fortunate, too, you deserted them for me.”
Rem stood like a stone. The interview appalled him, for reasons he failed quite to grasp. Certainly Kesarh’s private face was gone now, simply the grayness left in it, which might only be reaction to the weather. Shansarian blood disliked the bitter temperatures of this clime. One recalled occasionally, he was part Shansar.
“I’ll be taking ten or twelve men. Enough to manage a boat. I’d rather have you with me. But in my absence, I need you here.”
Once again, the unerring stab of casual and deadly trust.
Gratuitously, Rem responded to its blazon.
Just then, an awful screaming broke out somewhere inside the walls. His hand went to his dagger but Kesarh pushed the hand free.
“It’s only that poor little bitch from Xai. They must have told her her child’s dead.” Kesarh hesitated. Something moved behind his eyes, and then was gone.
• • •
To make a journey to his sister’s grave was eccentric for the season, but pardonable, estimable, perhaps. It showed a certain naïveté.
He would never have done it, risked leaving his prize even in the lacuna of the snow, save something drove him. An absurdity. Though he knew she was dead, he had never known it. She lived on for him, somewhere, unextinguished. Ankabek was at odds with both these feelings—the certainty of her death, the intuitive rejection of her death.
Whatever grisly witchcraft they worked on her, he would end that. Or was she, somehow, impossibly alive again, as she had never been anything else? It rode with him, on his back like a devil, as the horse his regency had brought him thrust its way, often breast-high in whiteness, toward the coast.
By killing herself she had won his contempt, his horror and his hatred. Their telepathy, haphazardly conveyed from the Shansarian side, had remained undeveloped, yet it was there; from birth, a part of them. He did not recognize it, had never considered it. Even when he woke at Xai crying out, or after, when he recalled that wakening. Nevertheless, Val Nardia had forced him, through the fact of that telepathy, to participate in her death.
The guilt for her death was another matter. That he accepted, shrugging it behind him, branded by it.
For the rest of his days he would carry that, the mirror of her terrified flight whereby to see himself, what she had fled from.
• • •
They led him into an unimportant room under the temple.
“Well,” he said.
A Lowland woman stood before him. She seemed to be the one from Rem’s narrative, but she was not dressed as she had dressed for Rem. Her garments were plain, only the violet gem on her brow to indicate anything.
“My lord Prince,” she said, “you’re here in good time.”
“Tomorrow’s sunrise, according to your instructions. And if I’d been delayed?”
“It did not seem,” she said, “you would be.”
There was nowhere to sit. He leaned on the wall and the melting snow slid from the shoulders of his cloak. The trees had cast it down on him as he walked over the island, though the air was becalmed like the sea.
“I’d like to know your name,” he said conversationally.
“Eraz, my lord.”
“Ah. The name of the hero Raldnor’s foster mother.”
“I was born in Hamos.”
“The hero’s foster village. Now a large town, I gather.”
“A room has been prepared for you, in the precinct of the novitiate.”
Suddenly he remembered her himself. This was the bitch who had led him to his sister, like a veritable madam, that last night—“How much do you want for this? Or is it to be a gift to the temple?” “The only gift which is required will be given.” He would have remembered sooner, but his eyes were dazzled from eight days’ snowscapes, aching from that and lack of sleep, his whole body dull with weariness.
“First,” he said, “I’d like to see my sister, the Princess Val Nardia.” He paused and said, without any expression, “Why did you tell Suthamun she was dead? To protect her?”
“She is dead, my lord.”
“Oh no. Dead women don’t bear.”
“I’m sorry to prolong your distress, my lord Prince—”
“Don’t worry about my distress. Worry about whether or not I decide to put your bloody temple to the torch.”
“No,” she said softly, “you won’t do that. You have built your reputation high in Karmiss. Such an unpopular deed would destroy all you had worked for.”
“All right. Just you, then. An official burning. Premature Lowland burial rites. When your unholy sorcery is exposed.”
“The Lord Kesarh doesn’t believe in sorcery.”
“That’s true. But you could try to convince me.”
“Then follow.”
So he let himself be led again. Yet when they got there, a curtain of figured gauze stretched midway across the room.
“No farther, my lord.”
“What’s to stop me, aside from the drapery?”
“Little. But you would kill your child.”
“Assuming I accept there is a child.”
“Assuming you accept there may
be a child.”
It was possible to see through the gauze to a shadowed bed. What lay there was hidden. Incense braziers burned about the bed, as they had burned in the chambers outside. Priests had let them in, priestesses passed quietly up and down between the smokes and the flimsy screens of veiling. It had been exotic but insignificant. None of Rem’s deep-seated, passionless awe had communicated.
“On a concealed bed,” said Kesarh, “there could be anything. A peasant girl, perhaps, near term, brought on by your drugs.”
Eraz raised her left hand, and the heavy drapes about the bed started suddenly to furl upwards. A showy bit of conjuring, obviously, some lever in the floor, or unseen accomplices.
The curtaining, then its shadow, left the bed.
Kesarh said nothing. For a long time he merely stood, gazing at the figure of his sister as she lay in her black robe, her scarlet hair. Her belly rose, great with its prisoner, her hands like white flowers spilled either side, and, at the robe’s black edge, the upturned stars of her feet.
Eraz had laid her fingers lightly on his arm. He became aware he had moved abruptly forward. “Not yet, my lord.”
“What are you doing?” he said. The words, unpremeditated, unclever, hung in the nothingness.
“Magic, if you wish. The will of the goddess.”
“Damn your goddess. She’s dead—you say she’s dead?”
“She is dead. It is the child which lives, and with the turn of the tide, the breaking of the dawn, the child will be brought forth.”
“Why?”
“Because Anackire wills it.”
“Why Val Nardia’s child? Mine?” He heard his own voice. It made no sense. He asked questions which did not matter to him. There were other things, but he did not know them to ask.
“Children of one womb and one birth,” she said. “A double being reunited, creating a third. A gateway. In spirit, it is not actually your child, lord Prince. It is another child, older. But still a child of a double being, two who are one. One that is two. I can’t convince you, my lord. Let someone take you to the prepared room. Rest there.”
“Here,” he said. “I’ll stay here. Have them bring a couch, some food. Here. I shan’t leave this place until you work your magic.”
“You’re tired. It shall be done as you want.”
He caught her wrist. The grip must have hurt her, it was meant to. Through the mist of the temporary snow-blindness, her eyes shone like distant flames.
“Whatever you owe your goddess, try to recall who I am.”
But she did not reply, and somehow she slipped from him and was gone. She had vanished before, the blown-out candle—How ridiculous it was. All of it unreal. Even alone, seeing Val Nardia before him, he could not now break through the flimsy gauze.
They brought seating, food and drink. He had left his men at the village. He required the priests to taste the food for him, and the wine. It was a pedantic insurance, he did not really suppose it necessary.
He took the refreshment sparingly, not meaning to fall asleep. And gradually his trained body, like an obedient dog, responded to his demands. Wide awake, he sat and watched Val Nardia through the blurring of his sight and the curtain.
At midnight, so he judged it, hooded black-robes began to file into the chamber. There they perched against the walls, motionless, like comatose birds of prey. Then the women came. They passed across the curtain and hid everything from him.
Kesarh rose, but they made way for him at once. He went back and stood by the gauze.
The priestesses entered, and between them another woman not of the temple, presumably from the village near the landing, or some other habitation on the island. She was a Vis, sheer Vis from the look of her. At the curtain she halted, to leave her shoes lying on the ground, and to throw off her dress before them all. Under it she was naked, a matron in her late middle years, of no attractions, but strongly made. The curtain parted. He could not quite distinguish the seam, but the woman stepped through. No others. Only she. And only her flesh, no other thing, to pollute or disrupt the vacuum of the spell.
Chanting started now, all round him. It irritated Kesarh. Its insistence on some word or group of words, over and over.
The light was going down. Everything was murky.
The woman had approached his sister. It occurred to him what she must be: a midwife for the dead.
He stood at the curtain and watched as nothing at all happened.
After maybe an hour of watching this, he went to the table and took more wine, to keep himself on his feet. When the monstrous lightning flash happened he wanted to witness it. To know when the trap-door allowed them to send through the alien child, soon to be presented to him, from between his sister’s dead legs, as his own miraculous offspring.
• • •
The prelude to the light woke one of Kesarh’s twelve men, and vacating the chilly village bivouac, he went to urinate.
Beyond a walled yard, the slope ran into space. Below, the sea smoldered on the beach of stones. The soldier, eased, but cursing with the cold, was yet arrested by some quality either of strangeness or unrecognized beauty in the dawn.
He walked to the low wall, and looked out along the straits into the east.
Clouds hung like a puff of icy breath at the horizon, just turning the shade of milky amber. Through this amber a slip of palest gold now pushed its way.
Emanations of the cloud had muted the disc of the sun. The man could look directly at it as it rose, round and luminous and curious, like some new planet born from the world. Indeed, this was what the sunrise resembled, the birth of a child, the round head emerging from a womb of cloud.
The man did not know why they had been dragged to Ankabek. Some duty, they had heard, to the Prince’s sister’s tomb—that surely could have waited till the thaw.
Yet the dawn held him there, in the snow-locked silence, feeling himself the sole human thing awake on the earth that saw the coming of the sun.
• • •
The chanting had stopped. Something had happened, but he was not sure. Had he slept after all on his feet, and missed it?
Then he saw the village woman bending forward. The room seemed to shake with a kind of noiseless thunder he did not know was Power.
The unlovely hands were thrusting, inside Val Nardia’s immobile body—The midwife bent to her task, rough, capable, and indifferent.
There was a welter of blood. Kesarh’s own breathing seemed to choke him. He expected the girl to shriek or spasm, but she was still, as if . . . she felt nothing.
The child came out in the woman’s hands. He saw it. Amid the scald of blood, the dancing cord joining it yet to the recesses of his sister’s body. There was the glint of a knife. The cord, severed, fell down like the dying snake at Tjis.
The midwife did something to the child, then turned and held it out toward all those behind the gauze.
There was no sound.
The arms of the child were moving slowly, and the head. It lived, though it did not cry. It was very white, as if luminous. Kesarh’s eyes seemed to have cleared. He could perceive the fruit of his seed and of Val Nardia’s dead womb was female. A daughter.
In the door, the priestess Eraz stood momentarily in his way.
“Yes,” he said. “I saw it happen. I’m the witness to your sorcery.”
“One will take you to the room now, where you can rest.”
He could hardly keep his balance, though he saw her with sharp clarity. “And when I wake up,” he said, “I may wring your neck.”
• • •
In the village above the beach, Kesarh’s well-disciplined soldiers kicked their heels, and attempted to pay for the food they were brought, as instructed. But the payment was left lying. Nor did they offer any violence to the women of the area, though there was nothing else to do.
<
br /> As the day began to go, they regretted they would have to spend a second night in the wretched dump.
Kesarh had other plans for them.
He was awake, dressed for traveling and drinking the wine left him, when the priest entered his room.
“Good,” said Kesarh. “Go find Eraz, and send her here.”
The priest, a dark man, looked at him. He had learned the way of looking that the Lowlanders had.
Kesarh observed it, then said, “Either you do it, or I do it. I think you’d all prefer the former.”
“Generally,” said the man, then, “the priestess Eraz is not summoned like a common serving-wench.”
“And generally I’m not kept hanging about.”
“My lord,” said the priest, “in this religion, a priest is the equal of a king. Or the greater.”
Kesarh crossed the room. He struck the priest a blow that sent him staggering. The hood slipped away. For a moment, only a cowering Vis lurched in the corner.
“But you see,” said Kesarh, “I don’t value your religion. Now get out and do as I told you. And while you’re at it, have them fetch me some decent wine.”
Eraz brought the wine herself, a curious almost playful addendum to the comparison with a serving-wench. It was Vardian liquor, some of the kind that had undone the Free Zakorians.
“The wine of the Shadowless Plains is not to your liking,” she said.
“No. I like nothing from there.”
He was restored, or seemed so. There was no mark of exhaustion on him, no hint of pain or unease.
“And you’ll be leaving us shortly.”
“As soon as you’ve prepared my sister’s body for the journey.”
Eraz met his eyes. She was, predictably, without readable expression.
“You will not trust her death rites to the temple.”
“You’d burn her, wouldn’t you? Cremation, the way of your Plains.”
“And of Shansar, which blood is in your veins, and hers. But the ashes should lie in the earth, unscattered, the spot to be indicated by stone.”
“She’ll have a tomb in Istris, in the old way.”
“Very well, my lord. I’ll see to it. There’s no need to fear corruption. Our drugs will keep her beauty pristine until you reach the capital, and for longer than that.”
