Anackire

by Tanith Lee

  The shattered mirror, that had been the focusing will of Raldanash, embers now, retained to itself the palest after-images of linking fire, one of which led northwest to the man who was his kindred, and one northeast toward the aurora of Ashni. But the subsiding embers could not sustain these connections. The trails of fire vanished. Soon only one slender and translucent link remained, scarcely visible while the larger lights had blazed.

  This final light did not yet fade.

  Its nether point, located on that line of Power which ran from Koramvis to the Zor, was the place of the earliest sacrifice, Ankabek.

  • • •

  She felt his dying, embers to clinker. Raldanash who had been her husband, far away, miles of land and space and time.

  She had come to her discovery along a steep and sightless mental tunnel, which she entered voluntarily when the door mechanisms closed her within the Sanctum. At the closing, she had lain down on the marvelous mosaic floor she could not see, and eventually, after some struggle, her ego and her name had gone from her.

  Ulis Anet. Val Nardia. Astaris. She had been each of them and none.

  She had trusted that Eraz would guide her, but she must guide herself, and so she did. She was so tired, it was not hard to choose this road, or follow it.

  As if in a boat on a black winding river, she poled upstream, sleeping or awake she could not be sure, nor did it concern her.

  Her mind filled itself slowly. The deep dreams, the conclusions, the solitudes. She herself came last of all, behind a train of fantasies. The inner she.

  And so at length she opened the single eye of the spirit, and became one with the will of the world.

  And when that will, having created its great sorcery, flowed away, she beheld Raldanash and how he died.

  A mortal woman, she had detested him for his unintentional cruelty. Such pettiness was irrelevant now. Now, emerging from her own purgation, she knew his, reckoned up what he had given, asking no recompense. She herself had no special psychic endowment, but she, like all things, held the magic of the force of life. And all around were the stones of Ankabek of the goddess, invocation of Anackire.

  Selfishly then, to redeem her own pain by knowing its littleness, she held out the lamp of Ankabek, slightest of fires.

  And so she did learn pain’s littleness. She learned in the surge of joy as this stranger, who was nothing to her and to whom she was nothing, yet heard her, yet answered, and reached out across the endless distances to receive the proffered light.

  • • •

  The ships of Dorthar circled in the vortex of sea and sea-wrapped wind.

  Only the Amanackire had dared go to the Storm Lord and lift him. He was borne to the cabin.

  Without comprehending, his men had seen he was the pivot of the miracle. Now, contending with the tempest, there was no leisure to dwell on it.

  Some wept, but there was salt water on all their faces.

  Raldanash lay on the royal couch as the ship jumped at the blows of the storm.

  The Amanackire stood by. They did not mourn. Ruthless in their faith, and pitiless, certain all men lived forever. What was death? Having only just participated in the lesson, they had missed it. Physical life was also sacred, and to be saved.

  Then they felt the telepathic stirring, turned to Raldanash, and saw his eyes open, the golden eyes in the dark face.

  He had come back from somewhere he had already forgotten.

  His body was weak and drained, listless, would scarcely obey him or acknowledge him. But the vitality in him was like a seed, which would become again the tree. His brain was already vital.

  He did recollect the instant, in the very act of falling, that he had seen they had won.

  The symbols were no more than that, gods were the emblem, as language was the expression of incorporeal thought. They had used only the power and strength and faith of mankind. It had been enough. The world was ended, and begun.

  And I, too, live.

  • • •

  The men in the black galleys rocking above Lan, having seen nothing sensational, were bewildered.

  There had been unseasonal storms that day, the winds casting from all directions. When night entered the world, a soundless calm drew in, as curiously unnatural as the turbulence before. In the heavy blackness the stars exhaled their glare. The moon came up from the hollow ocean. It was like some nightfall of history, aeons old.

  The men in the two black galleys, hesitated uneasily and listened to the emptiness and stared out at the stars. The ships were the command of Dhaker Opal-Eye. The third of their number had gone down at Karith, when Dorthar sent Free Zakoris back into the water. Such orders as Dhaker received had then dispatched his crews to Karmiss. Dhaker had objected. His own ship carried a passenger of whose identity King Yl was informed. A Karmian of stature, relevant to Karmiss’ present predicament. The Karmians might attempt to help—or at least to capture—this man. But Dhaker had no desire to reveal at large his prisoner’s name. Evasive, he could get no purchase on the obstinacy of the Free Zakorian command then licking wounds off Ommos. So, his ships turned for Karmiss, and skirted her. Dhaker had reckoned to join the Leopard’s forces at Okris delta.

  Rough weather caught them less than fifty miles from their objective. They sought to ride it out, but were blown instead, disordered, into the east.

  There were weird coronas in the storm. Fires came to perch along the masts and rails. Dhaker had beheld such wonders before. He kept his soldiers busy, and gave them wine and beer, and sent beer down to the slaves. In the evening, the squall had almost parted the two ships, but the abrupt leveling of the sea brought them together again.

  Then came the mystery of darkness and open water.

  A few hours after, there arose a wailing from the slaves. Someone had been possessed by bad dreams, now they were all catching it like plague. The steady hiss of the whips eventually doused this noise.

  “They say Rom walks over the ocean, a giant, with the moon in his hand.”

  “I’ve not seen him,” said Dhaker. “Not even with my missing eye.”

  Suddenly, he was moved to visit his guest.

  It was dark as night, but starless, in the lowest closed place of the ship. This underdeck, counterbalance to the tall stack of the vessel above, lay below the waterline, beneath the rowing positions. It might be utilized as cargo hold, or as dungeon. Dungeon now it was. The prisoner, naked but for hair and filth, sprawled there unmoving, till the Zakorian’s lamp and feet found him out.

  “Well, my lord,” said Dhaker, “did you enjoy the storm?”

  Kesarh, bloody and bruised on the rusty chains that, during the upheaval, had obviously slammed him over and again into the thick ribs of the ship, looked up at him. The black eyes still had cold heat in them. They should have been filmed over, if not blind. Dhaker’s surgeon had pulled the lashes out, repeatedly. Yet, through the caked blood, the cold heat and the sight continued.

  Dhaker liked this unquenchable quality. It would make Kesarh more difficult, therefore more interesting, to kill.

  “Istris was in splinters, the last I heard,” said Dhaker. “Does that make you sad?”

  But Kesarh’s emotions were well-chained up, you saw, like his body.

  Dhaker kicked him, lightly, in the mouth. A side tooth had been broken earlier, and Dhaker had allowed them to cut the lobes from the prisoner’s ears. These he had then sent to Yl as token, with the message of capture. That was sufficient for now.

  Dhaker went up again, noting on his way that the rowers had stayed restless after their discipline.

  The night was fine, and Dorthar comparatively near.

  • • •

  It was after midnight when the horns mooed.

  Some twenty ships of Free Zakoris had appeared in their path, seeming to have been storm-thrown as they were, off cour
se, and heading back northwestward.

  Dhaker’s pair of galleys rowed in among their brothers.

  Not a man but was struck immediately by the silence, almost idleness of every neighboring deck.

  Most of the sails were taken in, but here and there one hung from the yard, torn by the gales. The torches of Dhaker’s ships picked out on these remnants a muddy smear no longer recognizable as the war Leopard.

  Dhaker’s galley came up with the flotilla’s lead ship. Like all the rest, she was poorly lit. The men on her deck stood like pillars, or went about their work as if drugged.

  “To Dorthar?” Dhaker shouted out, not bothering with intermediaries.

  When the call was answered, Dhaker was amazed.

  The Free Zakorians were not bound for Dorthar. The war was—abandoned. They went home to Yl’s kingdom, in Thaddra.

  “Are you mad?” Dhaker bellowed. He seized a rope and would have swung over, but their captain had come on deck now, and gestured him away.

  “Not madness. The gods spoke to us.”

  “Gods—you mean some augury—”

  “Rom, and Zarduk. Their heads brushing the sun. I have seen it myself. He spoke to me, and his voice was intense. We’re to live in Thaddra. We were told. The sword’s broken.”

  “Crazy. This one is crazy.” Dhaker looked at his men, who gazed in awe at the silent ships all about them, setting their inexorable course for Thaddra.

  The barren dialogue was abrogated, and Dhaker’s vessels drew away.

  The black flotilla with its anonymous sails went drifting on, a phantom thing, dumb and demoniac as the night it vanished into.

  • • •

  In the world there were days and alternating periods of sunlessness, there were hours and minutes, scenes and the responses to scenes, and weather. Below, in the underdeck, there were none of these things. There was blackness, the shackles, stench, the taste of stench, or of blood, the dull noises of the ship. Being thrown against the ribbed kernel of the dungeon, that was military engagement or a storm. Daybreak was seldom, and only a lamp. The various tortures had served in the beginning as a means of telling time—the crescendo of pain, the pain’s slow ebbing. But now pain was universal and constant and varying—the gnawing of the fractured tooth, the bite of the chains in the raw wounds they had made. It was no longer helpful.

  One could think, of course, and frequently lose consciousness. Like a hibernating animal or a sick animal, Kesarh had this trick. Awake, he was never completely lucid, and knew it. All the same, he had not surrendered. He expected to outlast this misfortune, though he had neither fantasies of sudden rescue nor of an act of gods, in whom he did not believe. Nor, since he did not believe in a god within, did he presume himself capable of some feat of self-deliverance. His optimism, if such it could even be termed, had no roots therefore in fact.

  His resistance was his will, stronger than all the rest of his many strengths.

  He refused to finish here and in this way. Could not conceive of it.

  That conversation which had taken place between the Leopard ships by night had not, obviously, been relayed below. Yet there was some insubstantial whiff of it to be sensed. Soon, if timelessly, other awarenesses swirled through the timbers. The slave-rowers picked them up, became fractious or terrified. The sharp screams of men under the less tolerable of the whips grew nearly ceaseless.

  In a quintet of days—unseen, unknown: Above—Dhaker’s vessels had had other meetings. Some of these were with Free Zakorians beating a way from Karmiss, as Rorn had instructed them. They babbled of prodigies and were gone. Later, a brace of Kumaian vessels appeared around a headland, for they were in sight of the Dortharian coast by now. Outnumbered, but wild for a fight, Dhaker’s galleys had turned to attack, but the ships of Dorthar avoided and eluded them.

  There was talk then of raiding the first village they came to, but probably all such would be evacuated, or defended.

  Dhaker’s men were bewildered and afraid. Tensions were not restricted to the slaves. There must be some release. Dhaker had begun to believe the insane tales other Zakorian vessels gifted him. If not their truth, at least its effect.

  On the fifth day a herd of sea-ox came swimming on a great lacy wake, and the horns were blown and a furor started. His men had been moaning that Rorn arose out of the depths, before Dhaker roared them into stillness.

  Something was needed. Up in the world of days and nights and time and weather, Dhaker decided.

  When Kesarh was brought into the torch-lit cabin, Dhaker studied him with some pleasure.

  His captive’s body was painted by abrasions and the sores induced by chains, yet it had not wasted. After the perpetual dark below, the eyes were winced to slits, but the ice-flame of the black pupils stared through unabated. Kesarh had the royal atoms of Karmiss with the savage Shansar strain; and something more. He was not broken, not even twisted out of shape.

  There was food and drink. Dhaker invited his prisoner to dine. Kesarh, without comment, did so. There was no look of desperation, and none of the distrustful questioning almost any other man would have let slip. He supposes he will get through all this, Dhaker thought. The notion astonished him. Kesarh s will was powerful even now, and Dhaker for a second half doubted. Was it possible Kesarh might somehow escape?

  There was a vague sound outside, Dhaker’s orders being carried out. He abruptly recovered his wits. Escape was not possible.

  “You love me well,” said Dhaker to Kesarh. “You’ve confidence I won’t seek to poison you.”

  Kesarh had ended his meal, scrupulously.

  “And cheat Yl?” he said.

  “Oh, but Yl has lost interest in killings,” said Dhaker. “I’ve heard the signals have failed to show. His ships foundered against Ralnach of Dorthar, then, and never reached the Inner Sea. That, or the gods sent him home with all the rest.”

  Kesarh did not react to these riddles. He said, clearly, “Or else he remembers the treaty he made with me, and therefore with the might of Shansar-over-the-ocean.”

  “No, I don’t think he remembers that, Lord Kesr. I don’t think he remembers you at all. Vis has gone mad. In the land of madness, the sane must do as he reckons fit.”

  Kesarh’s eyes had opened, striving with the murky light. Dhaker felt the extraordinary authority of them.

  They sat in silence, neither prepared to ask the other to speak.

  Dhaker rose.

  “The cushions, there. Take rest. Sleep.”

  At last Kesarh said to him, “You have something strenuous in mind for the morning.”

  “My father,” said Dhaker, “died at Tjis. I knew him. He was good to me. It’s not sure we’ll reach home port, the world having addled.” The iron eyes never faltered. Dhaker nodded and went out. The door of the cabin was guarded, though he did not imagine Kesarh would attempt heroics. Even a quick death would not be attempted, for Kesarh did not credit he could die at all. He would sleep now, hoarding his endurance. In agony and hopelessness he would cling to life, assured it was his right, until the final drop squeezed through his fingers.

  A while before dawn Dhaker Opal-Eye reentered the cabin and regarded the unconscious man, his strong physique, which was about to become its own worst foe. On the left forearm, the wound Dhaker had cauterized had healed curiously, leaving a scar resembling that of a serpent’s bite.

  “Take him now,” Dhaker told his men. “Let him come to it as he wakes.”

  They did this, dragging Kesarh out into the nacreous vacancy that was ship and sea and sky. As the stars melted, they slung the chained man down, and hauling up his arms, hammered the spikes through his fetters to hold them in position. Then they raised the pole and secured it in a series of jolts, close to the king-sail. He was fully awake by then, and knew. It was an old method of execution, and very simple, common to all western lands, formerly a slave’s
sentence in Dorthar.

  Suspended from the pole by his upraised arms, his heels had already found the narrow resting place, and gripped there, taking the weight of his body. It would be a struggle to do this, but he would struggle to do it. There was a similar rest under the buttocks that might also be put to use, awkwardly and with difficulty. Since the hanging man would not be able to breathe without recourse to these supports, he would constantly resort to them. Constantly slide from them, constantly regain them. The struggle would be never-ending.

  Held by the wrists alone, the lungs cramped, the blood would not move. Asphyxiated, the condemned soon fainted; death could come inside a morning. But that was the swift way. This way was not swift. And Kesarh’s will, his haughty demand to live, would prolong the combat beyond total exhaustion. Three-quarters a corpse, he would still be struggling, sliding, struggling, gasping, and grasping, losing an inch, a moment at a time.

  And he would be given water, and food while he could eat it.

  It might go on for days.

  • • •

  Now there was light, and dark. There was sunrise through the great sail. There was sunset at his back, his own hanging shadow flung before him along the deck. Men would not cross over it. It was bad luck.

  Later, he did not notice this anymore.

  Air came by straightening, pinioning the heels and calves or the lower back or the buttocks against the pole. In a dizzying rush, the arms loosened somewhat, the lungs were able to expand. One did this until the anguish of the position forced feet or spinal muscles to give way. Then the former agony re-commenced.

  Shortly, all agonies were the same. To be lifted and to breathe in agony, or to let go and to sink in agony, stifling.

  He drank the water and swallowed the gruel.

  He glared into the sky.

  The sea was very flat, the deck flirted like a dancer. Men moved about, or stood, watching him. They were ghosts. They had no meaning. Nor the sky nor the sea. Only pain meant anything. But the pain was life.

  At the fourth sunrise, he had forgotten his own name.