by Adam Corby
Faintly he smiled. ‘It is your youth I see from your eyes,’ he said, as the servants went in to rouse the caretakers. ‘It is a thing given to few indeed, to return to youthful haunts and be a child again. It must be a wonderful feeling.’ The smile vanished from his lips, and a gloom fell over his lightless eyes.
But she laughed, and would not let him think of ruined Gerso. ‘No such moody musings hereabouts, my Charan,’ she chided. ‘By decree we forbid them – even though Dornan Ural has all the official parchments. Mark you the mountains above us. It was the fondest dream of my girlhood to scale their icy paths. Since then, though I have gone among them several times in the heat of summer, I have never ventured upon them in winter, when they are most majestic and dangerous. We shall go among them a-hunting, Jade, if you’ve a mind to.’
Thereat he raised his dark enigmatic face, and his eyes were sparkling. ‘And do you hunt, too? My Chara, if that be true, then I have found here all a man might wish for, in the deep of his hidden heart.’
The emerging caretakers greeted her with astonishment. Eagerly they helped her dismount and see to Kis Halá, Glory’s Lamp, a horse the color of an oil-flame. They entered musty halls to open shutters, sweep clean the webs, and set the kitchen fires roaring.
Alone in the great banquet hall the two of them ate and drank their fill, the Empress and her courtier, avid after long riding in the mountains’ airs. When the time of the shortsleep was upon them the dimchambers were not yet warmed: so, like old foot-troopers after forced stages, they lay together on bandarskins before the huge hearth carved of figures full of mythological import.
Within a pass, all preparations were complete, and men summoned from the village were assembling in the courtyard. Tall strong men they were, crafty in hunt or wood, and leading strong sly dogs on leathern leashes. Allissál emerged before them clad in hunting tunic of soft leather and fur warm against the frosty air. It had been the gift of her dear friend Lisalya, the Lady of Ul Raambar. Overhead, wintry clouds the color of dull venom-green slate were gathering; but Allissál only shook loose her foaming hair from the fur hood and laughed.
The huntsmen raised a cheer to see her standing there so brave and beautiful, and their dogs took up the cry barking, so that the din echoed from the walls of marble and charsanton. It was none of it like the somnolently buzzing summers she remembered. Then behind her Ennius appeared, to lift her lightly into her carmine and silver saddle. He swung up on his own mount, and presented her with the gilded horn of the hunt.
Kis Halá moved eagerly beneath her, as if sensing what was to come. She took up the horn in gloved hands slowly to her lips, relishing this moment. Cold against her warm soft mouth was the metal; and it tickled, so that she could not blow at first. Then of a sudden she gave three short blasts. The huntsmen roared, the dogs brayed, and the horses thundered out of the courtyard. The ice-clad stony paths clattered with the hooves as they rode up, upon the knees of mountainous giants.
* * *
Twelve passes they spent there, pursuing spoor of eklas and cornering mountain thorsas in their winter lairs. Their hoofbeats echoed off the steeps like the footsteps of titans, and their laughter was like brazen bells. For meals they ate the flesh of their kills, superbly cooked and seasoned by the skilled mountain men. When they tired they had simple tents set up on the ice by metal pegs driven into cracks in the stone.
Once they outdistanced the others and found themselves separated from them by the shadow-edge of one of the mountains. There they lost the spoor of the ekla, but found other game beneath the twisted pines, their bodies dark against the flaring, dying corona of Goddess on the far side and the ice melting and steaming underneath them. About them, the steeps of an icy desolation and the incessant winds; and no other life except for the pair of them – and one startled snow-thirsla that scampered at their sounds, its pink rump flashing. At this she laughed impudently at him, her eyes glinting in the shadow of her hair; and he chafed her.
In all, their party took five eklas and three monstrous mountain thorsas. Two of the thorsas Ennius dispatched, but the third, the largest and most fierce, she claimed for her own. Rushing in, her boots half-slipping on the snow-flecked ice, she thrust her silvered lance at the beast’s bowels, feeling the haft wrenched from her grasp. The thorsa bellow deafened her, she felt its fetid breath wash over her and the huge black curling claws raked her thigh, sprinkling blood on the snow. Fear surged in her, but she forced it back. She swept out her light hunting sword, fell, saw nothing but a rush of fur and animal sinew; rose and struck.
The thorsa screamed like a doomed and dying god, a cry echoed a hundredfold off the surrounding cliffs. Then sluggishly it fell on the lip of the precipice, its black, steaming blood spilling like heated wine upon the stained and melting purity of the snow.
The hounds drew round, maddened by the scent of the blood, but the whippers-in drove them back. She stood quivering in the darkly stained snow, bloodied sword still smoking in her gloved hand. Her mantle had been torn back and her hair fell disheveled over her brow and down her back. The golden hair caught up the light of the sun and threw it back shivering, almost too bright to bear. Her eyes were a frosty silver, color of the mountain ramparts about; her cheeks were the color of the maiden’s stain upon the marriage sheets; her breath emerged in little clouds of ice-flecked steam, quickly gathered by the winds. Standing so upon the edge of the infinite, the distant heroic mountains her backdrop, she seemed the very image of the primeval Huntress, Dhalki, consumed in ageless splendor.
The image was of but a moment; for then she stooped and with her own hand, and the sharp blue Raamba blade, severed the great head from the carcass. The attendants held it aloft dripping, all shaggy and black, its eyes and lips still frozen in the savage despair of its dying scream. They praised it as the finest they’d ever seen, not with the glib assurances of professional courtiers but with the rough familiarity of true comrades. She saw the face of Ennius smiling approvingly above the others, and every thought of Empire was driven from her mind. Gladly at that moment would she have forsaken all her power and ambition to remain thus, not wealthy or great, but the simple ruler of a small domain, so that she only had another with whom to share it.
Then a sudden consuming wave of weariness shook her and she fell, and had to be borne back to camp upon a litter of woven lances. Even so she did not pass from consciousness, but saw the cliffs wheeling about her, and heard the distant voices of the hunters speaking of her in tones of worship. Her mind still woke: it was but her body slept. Floating on that bier of lances she did not care. She felt only the fullness of her own happiness, and a childlike wonder.
Naked beneath a pile of thorsa- and bandar-skins in the soft brown gloom of her tent, she listened dreamily to the sounds of the men moving about outside in the camp. In the corners of her mind she was aware of exhaustion lurking like a shadow to carry her off; but she held it apart by force of will, waiting until he should come.
The flaps were suddenly sundered and silvery light illuminated the interior, blinding her. Then the darkness was renewed, and she felt his hand lightly stroking her brow. In her nostrils crept the aroma of something steaming and sweet. She opened her eyes.
His smile was gentle in the darkness. ‘Awake still? You’ve more of iron in you than many of the men I’ve hunted with. But there is no purpose in it now: drink this and sleep.’
She parted her lips slightly and accepted the hot spiced wine he had lifted to her mouth. ‘So the slaves would serve me when I was little and ill with fever.’ She sighed. ‘Only then I disliked it and, when they were gone, would pour it down a crack in the floor of my room by the wall. Emsha was furious when she found out. And are you reduced to the duties of a servant now, Jade?’
‘If you can become a child again, I can be a servant. Yours, anyway.’
‘That was only once I was really ill. I had the chills from the mountain air, because I had slipped away against their orders. But usually I was too protecte
d. I was not suffered to be ill; it was not permitted me, like so many other things. They were the slaves, and I the Bordakasha – still, the slaves gave the orders, and the Divine One had to obey. I disobeyed them whenever I dared,’ she murmured, finding his mouth with her wine-warmed lips. ‘It seemed my only real pleasure, though I was often in the wrong and did very foolish things just for the joy of confounding them. Even to Emsha I was merciless at times.’
‘Often,’ he said, ‘men will sigh that they were not born to a throne. But they little know the loneliness of royal children, who can have no close kin, no friends, no playmates of their own station.’
‘Even so – but how do you, who were not so born, know it? Yet listen, and I shall tell you how I got the fever when I was young.’
‘Later.’
‘No, now. I am Princess and you only my servant, remember. So they all addressed me: it was “Princess” from this one, “Divine One” from that. They were only slaves about me, and the children of slaves. The gulf was too great for friendship. Only Emsha would I confide in, and even she was not told all.
‘In that castle below us I was held captive, while my parents and the court abided in Tarendahardil and progressed about the Empire. I had lessons in rhetoric at this hour, courtly etiquette the next; languages before eating and history afterward. History was the only subject I enjoyed: it brought me closer to Elna. Even then I dreamed of restoring my Empire to its former glory. Philosophy was that which I most loathed: the tutor was a dry old fool, not unlike Dornan Ural. I played such tricks upon him I am sure he despaired of my ever becoming civilized.
‘And when spring came I spent the hours gazing through the windows at these mountains, still in winter’s sway. I, of divine ancestry, the child of the mightiest house in the round world, was held captive, while the children of my servants roamed free and ragged in the woods, climbing the cliffs for gerlins’ nests and bathing naked in mountain pools. When the blossoms were open in the lowlands upon the spring of my fourteenth year, I resolved to go.
‘I planned it thoroughly, with all the excitement of forbidden schemes. I hid dried meats, figs and nuts about my chambers; with considerable ingenuity, I secured and hid a stout rope beneath my couch. And then, upon the outbreak of a fine warm spell of weather, I slipped down out of my dimchamber window to the roof of the stables far below. I can show you the very spot; the drop does not look much to me now, but then it drove my heart upon my very tongue.
‘Upon that roof I felt as free as I have ever felt in my life. Even now I believe that had things gone as I’d dreamed, I would have cast my kingdom aside for a handful of figs and led an adventurer’s life. The air was sultry with heat. Below me I could hear the horses moving in their stalls as Eno, the stablemaster’s son, went among them with the feed. Behind me, through the wall, I could hear some of the slave-women gossiping as they went about their duties. The castle continued as ever, but now I was beyond its reach, an airy spirit with strange powers at my command, and no ties with those toiling mortals bound with the stone.
‘I went to the end of the stables as stealthily as I could and gazed down. Another drop presented itself to me, yet now I had no rope: it was tied securely to an iron rod in the wall of my dimchamber. The distance to the ground seemed much farther than I had thought, and I all but turned back. But my spirit returned and I tossed my sack of provisions to the ground. Resolutely I hung suspended from the lip of the roof, my fingers slowly slipping as the sweat broke from my palms. I could not see the ground or let go the roof; nor had I the strength to pull myself back up. Then my grasp slipped and I fell. I hit the ground hard upon my heels and rolled in the dirt, the breath stricken from my lungs.
‘It occurred to me then what would have happened if anyone had heard the noise. “What is this, young Mistress?” they would ask, their foolish faces shocked. That was a humiliation I could not have borne. But none came except Eno. He poked his head out of the stable door and looked at me slowly rising to my feet, my rags in disarray and face smudged with dirt. He would never have known me had it not been for this hair of mine. He looked me in the eye a moment, smiled, and returned to the stables. I gathered up my sack and ran loping through the gardens to the low part of the walls before he could give the word. And then I had climbed the walls and come to the woods above the castle, deep and dark and wonderful.
‘Soon the ancient trees shut out every view of the castle and I danced through slanting shafts of sunlight, laughing and shouting as if my tutor’s fears for me had been correct after all. I was making for the high passes of the mountains, to reach their other side. I had never seen the shadowside of a mountain before – such a thing seemed utterly mysterious to me. There giants and mountain spirits dwelt, or so they used to tell me; and I had gotten the notion that the spirits of our voyaged ancestors somehow congregated on the dark sides of mountains when the year was young. There I would find the souls of heroes and maybe even of great Elna, though they might outwardly be no more than ragged thieves. Three passes I spent there, sleeping on beds of moss by mountain streams and climbing ever higher.’
She fell silent then, so that it was as if the lurking weariness had finally come and taken her away. But then ‘It ended miserably,’ she murmured. ‘The warm weather did not last, and a storm came out of the Darklands, the last of winter in the mountains; and I was green with death. Finally I crossed over the high passes, shivering already with fever, to find – nothing. In that gloom the air was colder and fogbound as I searched about. There were only a few stunted pines growing from shattered, rocky walls, and ice bound in frozen waterfalls. In the shadow and the silence, I was utterly alone. They needn’t have scolded me when they found me, not really; nor looked so concerned when they saw me shivering. What was the sickness of my body, when all their costly physicians could do nothing to heal the wound within my heart?’
She looked at him, but his face was a shadow: not even the flecks within his eyes were visible now. ‘Do you know what first attracted me to you?’ she asked. ‘I think it was when I first asked you whence you came, and you said, “From beyond the mountains.” From the far side of the mountains, just as in my girlhood dreams… Why do you look at me that way?’
His whispered reply was lost in the sudden keening of the wind without the tent, a wind so sharp and dank it pierced even that pile of furs. It was the beginning of winter snows so heavy that they soon drove the hunters back out of the mountains and into the shelter of the castle below.
* * *
So time passed in the snowbound Summer Palace. Occasionally they would have their horses saddled and go riding over the white landscape and there she would always surpass him, for Kis Halá could go like a bird. Other times they met in the armory, where around a large firepit he would instruct her in the art of swordplay. Already she knew something of these arts, having been privately tutored by Ampeánor. Yet, though the Gerso was not the master Ampeánor was, he still had much to teach her. One thing she disliked about Ennius’s methods was that he always mastered her – Ampeánor had had the grace to allow her to win a point or two, to encourage her; not so Ennius. It made her redouble all her efforts with a fury, aiming for his heart; yet he never let her touch him there.
Once, returned from riding, they found a visitor awaiting Ennius. The short, coarsely featured man had just beaten the snows that had forced them in, and was warming himself before the huge fire in the banquet hall.
‘Your servant!’ she exclaimed. ‘I wondered why you had not brought him. Such a clumsy-looking fellow, how can he serve you?’
‘His life is mine,’ he answered. ‘I will hear what he has to say and rejoin you later – if you so allow, Princess.’
‘As you wish.’ She smiled. ‘I will be ready for you when you come to me, Jade.’ She left the hall, attended by two servants, with an eager grace.
* * *
When she had gone the smile on the face of the Gerso remained, making him seem even young. He turned to his servant shiver
ing before the high hearth.
‘And are you cold, Kuln-Holn?’ he asked jestingly. ‘Surely it is not so cold here as it gets in the far North.’
‘But it is high here, and far from the Ocean,’ answered the Pious One. ‘And we are close to the dark horizon.’
The Gerso barked a short laugh. ‘Well, but Kuln-Holn, I think it is rather you who have changed. Half I had forgotten you, here so far away from it all. What tidings from the North?’
Kuln-Holn shivered and drew closer to the leaping flames. Behind him the master stood before a large, unshuttered window through which draughts of wintry air entered unimpeded. ‘Lord, I entered their camp unknown, and went among them closely. When they do not quarrel over spoils they swill wine and carouse with the camp followers. And when they eat, they stuff their bellies two-handed. Between spilling blood and dining, they will not cleanse their hands, except to wipe them on the backs of the dogs. And the stink of the camp is a cloud that will not pass.’
‘What,’ asked the master sardonically: ‘and are they so changed as all that?’
‘I suppose they are as they ever were, lord. But they ought to be finer, now that they are kings in the North; and they seem only fouler.’
‘Rather conquerors than kings, Kuln-Holn.’ He had been looking through the window to the mountains above, their crowns concealed beneath the raging stormclouds. There had been a soft smile resting on his lips. Now he sighed, and turned his back to the window. ‘And Gen-Karn?’ he asked at length.
‘Lord, this much I learned. Soon after Carftain fell, Gen-Karn gathered his Orns and fled the camps, taking the road to Tezmon. With him he took the Buzrahs, whose feud with the Karghils had broken out anew; the Raznami, and the Jalijh clan of the Pes-Thos. With them also went scattered warriors of various tribes, who were discontented because of the ban upon open looting.
