Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn 2 The Divine Queen

by Adam Corby

  ‘Your majesty, choose some other for this errand,’ he pleaded, angry and hurt at her command. ‘But do not, I beg you, cause me to miss this battle, which should prove the most glorious and slaughterous conflict we will know in our lives. Does your majesty doubt my loyalty or ability, that you should so insult me? Or is it a harsh fate that leaves me always behind?’

  ‘We have no doubts to your ability, Captain – it is the reason we chose you. As for your loyalty, that you may prove by going north. There are other good reasons besides, why we would have you, our finest soldier, and no other, perform this duty. Go to Rukor – raise an army from the countryside, and await our calling of you. We may yet have great need of you, in circumstances which it would prove ill-omened to speak of now.’

  And he, though he argued further and seemed angry almost to the point of rebellion, at last agreed to obey the command of his sovereign, and took his leave.

  Dornan Ural had looked on this scene with some confusion. ‘Why, is there something else to attend to?’ he asked. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’

  ‘It is a thing of small importance,’ she replied. ‘A detail we would not wish to burden you with. You have worked hard on our behalf, Dornan Ural, and earned our gratitude.’

  ‘It was not for you we worked,’ he answered, somewhat sullenly. ‘We worked for our city and our home.’ Then his mood brightened as he thought of the great army he had gathered without the city. ‘How long, do you think, before the news comes?’

  ‘Not long. Thibbold will be defeated quickly enough. Then we must be ready here.’

  ‘Defeated! Why, how do you foresee that? The barbarians have but half our numbers!’

  ‘Numbers signify nothing. Generals signify everything. Ara-Karn and his chieftains have been outnumbered and surrounded on every step of their long, blood-weltered journey. With Ankhan and his Raambas, and the generalship of Ghezbal Daan, we might have held them off. But Charan Thibbold, though the best we have, is not the equal of Ara-Karn.’

  ‘You speak, your majesty, almost as if you knew this Ara-Karn intimately – as if you admired him,’ he added cruelly.

  Yet the insolence did not seem to trouble her. ‘Perhaps I do,’ she said softly, letting her gaze roam about the high hall.

  ‘Yet you were not in all matters so prophetic,’ he said. ‘For I seem to recall other words of yours, when you swore before all the heavens that Ankhan of Ul Raambar would not forsake us; and where is he now with all his famous soldiers?’

  ‘Had Ankhan of the Strong Heart received our messages and been able to reach us, he would be here. You are wearied, Dornan Ural, and drunken, and it has not improved your manners. Go back to your hall and rest. You have done well, but for now our part is over with, and all we may do is wait and pray to Goddess.’

  He bowed and left her. Anger and annoyance at her calm certainty burned in him all the way to his mansion; but upon reaching the stillness of his gardens he fell upon a couch, exhausted and dazed. He slept briefly, woke and slept again. Now an old, enfeebled man, he had driven himself upon his city’s behalf unstintingly, far beyond the limits of his strength. Out of love and shame, he had offered up his own health in sacrifice and expiation for all his earlier errors and failings of foresight. Now even in the sleep of wine his limbs shook.

  Standing over him was his wife, an elegant woman dressed darkly even as her husband in mourning for his two sons, who had perished with all the other happy guests of Arstomenes. Behind her, a young man leaned against a pillar of the stoa. He was dressed in the latest fashions, and his looks could only be called beautiful.

  ‘Look at him lying there, twitching and slobbering,’ the young man said. ‘How have you borne it so long, to share the couch of such a toad?’

  ‘Be silent, Relanistir,’ she said, looking still upon her husband’s form. ‘I have told you before, he and I have not touched each other for years. Nor were you so disdainful of the gifts this man’s money bought you.’

  ‘Well, at least it is over,’ he said sulkily. ‘Come away now, Khilivirn, can you not? The bearers are waiting. Or is there something you have forgotten?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  He laughed slyly, caught her in his arms and kissed her skillfully in the shadows of the colonnade, so that despite herself Khilivirn laughed.

  Dornan Ural, roused partway from sleep by their voices, looked out through dark-weaving eyes to behold his garden. It had been shamefully neglected these weeks, he thought dimly. Weeds choked the rows, and the vegetables were rotten and insect-ridden. He must attend to it when he was better.

  * * *

  Even then, at that selfsame moment under heaven, Ampeánor rode down into a broad shallow stream in the midst of the forest. Behind him he led the horse on which he had bound his barbarian captive. The pebbly currents washed and bubbled about the legs of the weary horses, which lowered their heads and drank, grateful for the respite. Far over their heads, a gap gleamed in the thick walls of green and purple leaves, where the sky meandered like a broken stream of blue and jade.

  Ampeánor dug his knuckles into his sore neck, softly cursing the forest, the flies, and his own folly. Still they were lost here in these trackless woods where no men ever came save for thieves and runaway slaves. Wandering almost aimlessly, taking turns at hazard to evade the barbarians close on their trail, Ampeánor knew not even in what quarter of the sky the bright horizon was, or in what gross direction Tarendahardil lay.

  Behind him Gundoen, his thick arms bound about the breast of his horse and his massive legs secured beneath the belly, bent up his head and regarded his captor with a malicious eye.

  ‘Not long now, Southron,’ he said. ‘Those are men of my own tribe who track us – I know them by the calls they make. My tribe’s trackers are the finest in the far North. And they are drawing nearer. You have been clever so far, more clever than I would have expected; but it won’t be enough in the end. Not long now, until you stop to rest a moment, even as now, and – phh-t! – a death-bird will find your gorge, and there will be an end to you.’

  By now Ampeánor knew better than to respond to the barbarian’s taunts. Slapping at a fly, he took the reins and urged his steed on, following the currents of the stream. From all sides the pungent odors and furtive, echoing cries of the immense forest surrounded close upon them.

  By now, Ampeánor thought gloomily, Allissál will have regained her strength. The image of Qhelvin’s painting swam through his limbs with a pain and desire and loneliness, like some great wriggling eel. By now he might have been her consort and commanded all the armies of the League of Elna. Goddess, he wondered, why have I been so hasty and reckless? This seeking had been folly from the first. It is as if a spell has been put upon me, he thought bitterly, the spell of that damned painting.

  When the streambed turned treacherous, Ampeánor rode up the far bank, where he vanished with his prisoner amid horse-high ferns and writhing tree-roots as large as chimneys.

  Far behind them, the several barbarian trackers rode into the stream and examined the signs along the bands. Dividing into two bands, they followed the stream in both its directions with the steady, confident pace of those whose quarry cannot escape. About them, too, the odor and distant bruit of the forest closed like a curtain drawn across an alcove withdrawing it, for a time, from view.

  * * *

  From the Palace rooftop, Allissál watched the departing masses of men waving in the distant field like some sea of iron wheat beneath Goddess’s broad face. She watched them go with no great hope or fear, but only resignation. She had done all she could, knowing well it would prove in the end useless. At least, in Haspeth and his men in Rukor, she had kept some small reserve, which might be used either for a shelter or a counterattack. She felt like the chara in some old romance awaiting her far-flung suitors, who must journey perilous ways to attend her father’s feast. Ampeánor from the bright horizon, and Ennius – Ara-Karn – from the dark: impatiently now she awaited their retur
ns. What Ampeánor might have done in the barbarian camp was not apparent at so great a distance; Ennius’s accomplishments were loudly told, in the silence emanating from Ul Raambar.

  She kept even now his secret. It was not a thing she relished, that all men should know what a fool he had played her for; and she wished the vengeance that struck him should come from her alone. The two Gerso merchants had long ago departed Tarendahardil without ever learning whence that portrait had come. The earliest messages she had sent to Ul Raambar and the other cities along the dark horizon had but asked that the Gerso charan be placed under guard and escorted back to Tarendahardil. Those first messengers had returned with only the news that Ennius had departed Ul Raambar with great honor and celebration, and had not been seen since. She knew his presence, though; felt it in all the events around her, a darkness as of a storm-cloud’s brooding, baleful shadow. Out there somewhere in the world he was, regarding her and waiting. It had surprised her little when Ghezbal Daan had not responded to her call; not at all when the distant fastness of Ul Raambar fell silent and unheard-from, as though it had never been.

  XXI

  The Voyaged One

  THE MANY ARMIES of the League of Elna never returned to the city that had so grandly welcomed them. Only a few soldiers came back – their words were not understood, but the look about their ghastly eyes was talebearer enough. It had been defeat, unadorned and dreadful. The Eglands were lost, and the barbarians moved to the dark horizon on Fulmine.

  No response was issued from the hall of the High Regent. Dornan Ural, in a state of collapse, had been borne up into the Citadel for his safety from the anger of the populace. The Seven Ranks of the city’s administration had lost all semblance of order or authority in his absence. But messengers descended from the Black Citadel, and the Queen herself rode the Way of Kings to the harbor and back in a silver chariot: and the sight of her did much to cheer the throngs. The priestesses made prayer and sacrifice to turn back the barbarians, and said the signs were auspicious; but the peoples of the lower city sharpened knives and swords and axes.

  They would not cower in the face of the barbarian. Their City was the loveliest, the richest and the best in all the round world, but it would not remain so for long. Ever had Tarendahardil, Queen of cities, disdained the use of walls. When the last of the wounded was dead, when the last of the fires was quenched, when the last of the blood was expunged, then even in victory, this City would be little more than a ruin. The tales the refugees told eloquently bespoke the evil dream to come.

  They abandoned the outer fringes of the city. Tarendahardil’s only defensible lines lay above the sweeping slopes underpinning High Town. Tens of thousands from the lower quarters took their belongings by the cartload into the crowded streets of the upper city. Weapons were gathered in great quantities; more were repaired or forged. The smiths worked unceasingly, the clangor of their iron hammers the only sounds in the desolation of the lower city. The Hall of Rukor was emptied of its fine collection. A man might get a sack of gold for a blue Raamba blade. The axes of butchers were readied to dismember human flesh, the adzes of carpenters to make planks of human limbs, cooks’ knives to carve living hearts.

  And when the armies of the barbarian were sighted on the southern cornfields, the peoples of the City scarcely stopped in their preparations for an hour to see the tents put up on the martialing fields across the rift, the metal riders ranging the city, and the ships of the pirates like a hedgerow round the harbor, hemming them in at last. Scarcely an hour they stopped; then shrugged, and went back to their labor.

  * * *

  Kuln-Holn the Pious One wandered the lower levels of the Palace like a shadow, and scarce knew what to feel.

  Long ago, he had made a friend of one of the Palace slaves. Berrin was a kitchen slave, and it had been he who had taught Kuln-Holn the language of the Southrons. Now Kuln-Holn slept in Berrin’s corner of the sleeping hall below the Palace, where the stones were ever-warm from the ceaseless fires of the cooking hearths. Kuln-Holn had not returned to his master’s chambers since his master had departed for the dark horizon; nor had he dared return to the Brown Temple.

  At first, Berrin’s wife had looked unkindly upon Kuln-Holn, fearing that her husband in his kindness to this uncouth man should bring grief upon himself. Yet as time passed and none asked after the missing servant, she had come to pity Kuln-Holn, for his sufferings were apparent. She brought him scraps of choice food, and Kuln-Holn would feel her swelling belly and prophesy for her as to the fate of her coming child, telling her only happy things, whereat she would laugh and clap her hands. But Kuln-Holn did not laugh. He put no trust in visions seen in smoke and hearth-ash and dusky clouds. Such things were now but a bitterness in his mouth.

  While the others were at their labors, Kuln-Holn would wander the mazelike corridors and undercourtyards that were thick with pillars like some shadowed, leafless wood. It happened once that he strayed above, and found himself before the doors of the Hall of Justice. He had never dared enter it before, but it seemed empty, and the temptation was too strong. At the far end of the Hall a vision appeared to him, of a lovely woman in a high throne set in a well of Goddess-light. She did not move, or seem to notice him. It was a scene weirdly beautiful. Kuln-Holn walked toward the vision, crossing slowly the field of the huge tile floor between the immense pillars. But when he was quite near the clack of his sandals reached the ears of the vision, and he saw that she was alive, and that she lifted her head and put her eyes on him.

  He stopped deathly still, fear and confusion welling in him. It was the Queen herself – and she knew him. At the anger he saw in her he would have fled, but that he could not. Never, not even at his master’s side, had he been so very near to her. He flung himself before her and cried out,

  ‘Forgive me, forgive me!’

  ‘Kuln-Holn, Pious One,’ she answered in his own language, ‘what do you here? Did you not go with your master – or has he now returned?’

  Suddenly he knew his master’s secret was no longer hidden from her. His confusion grew.

  ‘Your majesty,’ he uttered miserably, ‘I did not go with him. I thought he was another, but now he has become drunk on all his victories, the deaths and the blood, so that he has forsaken his mission. Does he not realize that She will cut him down for this affront?’

  The Queen was silent for a space. Then she bade him rise – fearfully, he did so. Now he saw a bitterness in her eyes that marred her beauty. There were lines beneath her eyes, and she was very thin from the illness that had all but killed her. Kuln-Holn knew who it was who had wrought this change in her.

  At that moment, had Ara-Karn stood near, Kuln-Holn would gladly have taken his master’s dagger and slain him in a frenzy.

  The Queen, regarding him sharply, signed him nearer.

  He stepped onto the dais and stood before the throne, so that his shadow crept up across the lora of yellow ivory she wore. She put out her hand, weighted by the heavy ring of her seal. ‘Take it,’ she commanded.

  At the touch of that cool softness in his own coarse, great-fingered hand, he felt his heart leap. The fragrance of her perfumes was dizzying.

  She said, holding fast his gaze, ‘And do you swear, Kuln-Holn, before Goddess and all you hold sacred, that you will serve us faithfully and never work our harm?’

  ‘I – I swear it,’ he answered.

  All at once, it was as though a heavy weight had been struck off of his shoulders. He knew not why, but he felt almost happy.

  ‘And are you sure, Kuln-Holn, that you have put him behind you? They are your people outside the city, and you loved that man. Can you now serve us and be an enemy to them?’

  ‘Majesty, truly, Ara-Karn is now but a dead thing in my heart. He has spurned the path of Goddess: now may his falling be a hard one.’ So he said; yet whether he truly felt so, not even he might have said.

  ‘That is well,’ she said. ‘So you may now prove it to be a truth by ascending to the roof
tops of the Palace and looking with us out upon your fellow tribesmen, who have come this pass to test the courtesy of Tarendahardil.’ At that word, Kuln-Holn’s heart quailed; but he could not deny her. So they went up, and looked across the waiting city to the tents set up on the martialing field.

  * * *

  ‘What is it?’ Kuln-Holn asked nervously.

  The distant clangor from the city had slackened into silence. The Queen pointed in silence to the cause. Kuln-Holn shaded his eyes from the glare of Goddess, and at length saw them: a band of several hundred wild horsemen riding furiously toward the abandoned outskirts of the city.

  ‘Is this the attack, then?’

  ‘No,’ she replied, drawing the cowl forward over her brow, deepening the shadows about her brows. ‘They are too few. Yet they ride hard for a delegation, almost as if they sought to escape from their fellows. Renegades, perhaps, with a change of heart? Yet the camp beyond remains still, and none follows.’

  From the stables of the Citadel, shouts and laughter rose to them, as if the guardsmen were glad to see the wait ended. Kuln-Holn leaned warily over the parapet. Far, far below, a company of Imperial guardsmen was riding through the double gates, to meet and challenge the barbarians. Swiftly they made their way through the crowds, down to the empty lower streets. Their armor glinted like laughter. They met the invaders at the edge of the city, but it was too distant for Kuln-Holn to see well what went on there.

  ‘Come, Kuln-Holn,’ the Queen said. ‘Let us go down to await this news. Perhaps it is a meeting they seek – perhaps, after all, your master hesitates to assault us here. In the meantime, you will tell us of the past, and how it was you came to serve so bloody a king. Some little already we know: the rest you will tell us.’

  They passed below, beneath the walls of cool stone. Half a score of the most beautiful maidens Kuln-Holn had ever seen attended her majesty. It being the time of the second meal, platters of nuts and meats and fruits were brought forth; yet Kuln-Holn could eat none of it. He felt some uneasiness in his belly, as of a premonition. He knew too well the crooked turns of his master’s dark humor – who knew but that he might himself have ridden into the city?