Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  “Will you drink?”

  “Not with you.”

  “Ah, but we have had all that. My hounds never bite me more than once. I was considering you might break horses for me, but I can always send you to tend the hot pipes in the cellar.”

  He upended the wooden cup, and let the green wine spill on the flags of his palace floor. Certain city customs he adhered to; drink poured for an underling was no longer fit for a prince.

  “You have regained foolishness with health,” he said, not angry, merely bored by my reluctance to serve him.

  He pressed an iron knob in the wall. The knob was shaped like a dragon’s head, another marvel. This building was less carious than Kortis’ stronghold; the sack and the war fires had spared it. He had more people, too; the mansions that towered away down the sloping streets behind had had an appearance of habitation, lights and dim murmurings, talk and music and the distant clamor of a smithy rising up on the pre-morning air, together with various smokes.

  “There is another small reason why I have brought you here,” Erran said, “beyond your usefulness, beyond the mild pleasure of outwitting Kortis and the rest who obey the ancient codes like fools. This other reason I shall show you.”

  On this cue, the tapestries folded aside. A man held wide the carved door, and Demizdor came into the room.

  I had not expected her presence here. I had no reason to.

  She had had space to steel herself for this confrontation. She walked to Erran, bowed to him, and stood, slim and proud and immobile, the immemorial stance of Demizdor, the pose in which I had so often seen her. She did not hide her face in the deer-mask—etiquette did not permit it, presumably, before a gold lord—but she kept that face like white enamel. She wore a dress with tight sleeves and a nipped-in waist, dyed Erran’s dark ocher, which was an ugly, barren shade on her.

  I surprised myself then. I found that no longer did I feel anything unique or disturbing for this woman. My liking had healed like the scarless wounds. She had been too much trouble for too little recompense, and she had spit venom on my name one time too many. Yet it was not quite that. My lovesickness was dead enough that I could even pity her, for, without the love, I saw to the roots of her now, where the maggots were biting at her heart.

  Erran was scrutinizing me with interest.

  “This lady,” he said, “sought me yesterday. Her beauty is unrivaled in Eshkorek, and her person currently unengaged. She has promised she will remain with me if I will spare your life.”

  I had already fathomed enough of him to know it was not the acquisition of Demizdor that had tempted him to my rescue, but a desire for power over his fellows. A fledgling of my father’s ilk, maybe, he wanted me for his pawn. And now he did not parade Demizdor as an acquisition, but to see how much of a hold he might gain on her by owning me, how much of a hold on me by possessing her.

  “That was generous of the lady,” I said. “No doubt she has mentioned how I raped and degraded her among the tents of the shlevakin.”

  “No doubt she has. Do you think she asked me to spare your life in order to bring you ease? She wishes you to live that you may endure slavery. She desires that you grovel in the bowels of Eshkorek twenty years or more. When your spirit is smashed she will draw her breath in peace. So she asserts.” His voice and his smile indicated that he, too, assessed her motives differently.

  There was a certain way he looked at her, a certain inflection when he spoke of her, that told me he had had her. It did not even rasp on me. I thought, You have bought a dry bed, Eshkir prince. She will not be for you as she was for me.

  Her enamel face was aloof, cool as morning.

  Erran said, “Demizdor, my sweeting, I must disappoint you, just a very little. I am planning to breed mighty boys from this one. He shall rest soft for today and tonight, for he has had two hard nights of it.” At that she came alive, turning to him wildly, but he clapped his hands and a bronze-mask came in. “Take my guest to his apartment,” Erran said. “See he has what he wants, except, of course, a silver woman, or the key to the doors.”

  “My lord,” Demizdor cried. Her color was up and her coldness all gone. “Am I to see this vileness every day about your palace?”

  “Do not be importunate,” he answered. “Perhaps he will not take to luxury, your royal tribal barbarian. Then I shall have no choice but to send him below. You can always hope for that.”

  He waved me toward the bronze-mask.

  Having no option, I obeyed him and followed his soldier-servant into the frescoed passageway. As we went, I heard him say to her, in that winsome, smiling tone of his, “Come, Demizdor, it is nothing. Imagine your gown was muddied and now it has been cleansed. Do you see this pendant of gold? It was my grandmother’s, but you shall have it. Look at the gold, and forget him, pretty Demizdor. You have not necessarily been foolish, coming to the house of the leopard.”

  The dawn was burning up behind an apricot window when the door of my new prison was shut on me.

  It was the best lodging I had had for some time.

  Amber walls and amber drapes, interrupted by two great windows, each of a hundred pieces of thick-colored syrupy crystal set in a frame of heavy leading, the eastern one of which now threw a fantastic shattered patchwork of flame and shadow onto the marble flags. Having pointlessly tried the door, I investigated these windows on a sort of ironic reflex, but was not surprised to see that the city streets lay far below. Even if I could have breached glass and frame, the leap would have cost me a whole spine.

  Against the south wall lay a sleeping couch, wide enough for two, or three had you the mind for it, with thick pelts spread for comfort. Several narrow tables and benches littered the body of the room. The floor was warm from the slave-manned hot pipes, a delicate reminder, perhaps, of my punishment if I thwarted my owner. A bathing cell led off the larger chamber. It had a bizarre marble latrine that might be flushed by a bronze faucet, and brazen lions’ heads spit water into the bath.

  I had not been long in the apartment before two men with brown cloth faces entered through the recalcitrant door.

  One was a barber with razors and a pot of scented grease. He bowed to me, making me curious as to what rank Tuvek the slave might have been promoted, then set about shaving me, dexterous as Kortis’ man had been the day before. The other cloth-mask laid out a fresh set of clothes and city linen.

  When they were gone, having acquired a taste for the Eshkirian bath, and with nothing more pressing to attend to, I took one and presently dressed. I kept the black garments I had got from Zrenn’s prank, all but the tunic that he had sliced to ribbons. The color of the new gear was Erran’s, an extra branding I could have done without. Yet he had left me the chain of gold links and the arm-ring of jade; only the black ring was gone, sent back to Kortis as proof of my capture, probably.

  As I was belting on the tunic, the door opened again and in stepped a satin-masked girl with a tray of food. She set this on a table, and fled.

  It was bronze wear on the tray. My master had ostentatiously promoted me, no doubt of it. On the bronze, an average meal of bread and meat and autumn fruit, good enough, but not suited to the surroundings. This was not his condescension, but the poverty of the city showing itself like the cracks in the plaster and the mouse-holes under the drapes. Only the wine was princely, as clear as the crystal that contained it.

  All this while I had been amused, irritated, impatient, and at a loss. I was Erran’s pet, his fierce beast with a dubious pedigree. I could see no method of escape, but I had vowed to observe and to prepare against the hour when some chance would come. It did not occur to me that, I, too, should be observed, or that any immediate trap would be laid for me.

  However, the wine had medicine in it, and soon after I had drunk it, the floor tilted and the light of the window went out.

  I recovered my senses when the five physicians were still
present.

  The chamber was scattered with their anomalous and eccentric instruments. They themselves were of the bronze order, and wore Erran’s dark ocher. They were muttering over their philosophies like five elderly hens, one of whom has laid a square egg.

  The dazzle in the apricot window was still golden. At first this puzzled me. Then I realized it was the opposite casement, and that the dawn was long past and the day had descended to sunset as I lay drugged on my couch, naked as a babe under their dissections.

  I felt no apathy or weakness now, rather a towering mad rage.

  I came off the couch in one great jump, and the five yellow hens retreated before me, clucking.

  “Sir, sir, be calm,” one cried. “We are Lord Erran’s ministers. We have done you no harm. Merely examined your body in order to ascertain the source of its wondrous healing—”

  They had left, alas, no handy surgeon’s knife for me to grasp.

  I shouted: “Well, then, what you have discovered? Am I a sorcerer? Or a god, maybe?” I was thinking that if I panicked them, they would fly out of the door, leaving it wide for me to follow. Then I, presumably clad only in my skin, would make for freedom, unhampered by guard or sentry. At length, however, I regained some of my wits, abandoned the scheme, and sat down on the couch, at which the physicians gathered their paraphernalia and crept to the door. This, after they had tapped on it, was opened and the gentlemen departed.

  Then the lethargy came, turgid as the sludge of some river.

  I lay back on the couch and the sunset died gloriously in the window glass. I was a fool. A dog, kept in an opulent kennel. And this reality mated with a heritage eternally lost, and an abnormality that made me cringe when I remembered it. For I was sobering now, in the way every drunkard must, recalling my abilities with fear and amazement. My whole life I had accepted the unacceptable. But the chase had caught me up. It seemed to me at that moment that I might as well serve Erran, for all the use I had or ever could make of myself.

  There came eventually another, more gentle whisper of the curtain at the door. I did not raise my head to see who had added themselves this time to the concourse in and out.

  “Whoever you are,” I said, “the pet slave is in a killing mood. You had better take your leave.”

  A couple of soft little cries went up like two pigeons disturbed on a roof. At that I looked.

  They were two girls, ambered in the last of the afterglow, their faces bared, pretty as flowers, their bodies almost bare under thin dresses of what seemed pleated cobweb. They were not really afraid of me, for they knew men, or thought they did, and had been sent to pleasure one. But, finding me naked and angry, they had acted, as any schooled whore will do.

  I would have liked to turn them out, for I had had a surfeit of Erran’s gifts and subtleties, and I had mused also on his plan to breed me like the bull. Yet I felt at once the sort of dreary urgent concupiscence that sometimes comes with fever.

  Seeing me aroused—I had no means to conceal it—they glided at once to the couch. One kissed my mouth, the second caressed my body; then the second fastened on my mouth, and the first lay in my arms. It was like supping from two cups that changed their perfume and their sweetness at every sip, as each mingled with the other.

  I appeased my hunger and my wrath with a murmuring, four-limbed, twenty-fingered, double-mouthed goddess of smoky desire, while the window reddened and dissolved in night.

  My duet of lovers left me at sunrise. Later, the barber came back with his pots and blades. I looked at the razors, set out and gleaming, and I knew I should not be robbing him of them. The fight was done and no blows struck. The panther was safely locked again in his tasteful cage—if he had ever been out of it.

  Erran visited me an hour before noon.

  He glanced about, unmasked, smiling as ever, and indicated my untouched breakfast.

  “No appetite, Vazkor? I’m sorry to note that.”

  I said, “The last meal I ate here had a curious effect on my digestion. I fell asleep and dreamed that five senile old men were probing my body with their unwashed fingers. And when I inquired what they were at, these same perfidious old men declared that you, my lord, had sent them.”

  Erran’s smile broadened.

  “You are learning to be elegant,” he said. “How entertaining. To make a neat sentence one must control one’s anger. I see you have done so. However, I assure you the food hereafter will be pure.”

  “I can forego eating with no trouble,” I said. “I have always needed little. A legacy of my sorcerer father, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps. Certainly you are not quite human, my Vazkor. Though human enough, I surmise, to enjoy the other fare. Did the girls entertain you?”

  “Ask them. No doubt they also had your leave to study me.”

  “That test was rather one for you to set yourself. I want your answer, you see. Do you wish to live well with me, or ill? Agree to my terms, and you can stride about my holding like a free man, though with a bronze or two to guard your person from the other princes of Eshkorek, and also, I must admit, to dissuade you, should you unwisely suffer an urge to leave my court. There will be food and fine drink, women in plenty, boys if you’ve a notion for them. You shall break horses for me, the fiery stallions of the Eshkorek valleys. Not mean work for a strong tribal brave. Your rank will be of the bronze, but you shall sit in my hall for your meat. If you are obedient, you may rise to the silver.”

  “You do not need a breaker of horses,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “What, then, do I need?”

  “A pawn for whatever power-game you are mindful to play.” I let him savor that, then I said, “So, my lord. I am your pawn.”

  His shrewd blond weasel’s eyes ran over me.

  “Your surrender is more swift than I had hoped for. I thought after all you would require some lessoning.”

  “I have no better existence to look forward to than this you offer. The day I find one, you shall know of it.”

  “Oh, yes, my warrior. I shall know, and never think I shan’t.” He walked to the door, turned, and beckoned me to follow. “You can come and go as you want,” he said, “now that you are in my service.”

  When I went up to him, he showed me a silver ring and the slot in the door that it fitted (this being the sort of key they used most often in the cities), then put the ring into my hand.

  Accordingly, the son of Vazkor and of the goddess-woman Uastis became the horse-breaker of Erran, leopard prince of the yellow city.

  As I had told him, I guessed eventually I should be more than that. I should be his pawn in his game of Castles. Maybe I had some inchoate purpose, some forethought that when he began to use me, I should, in being used, use him, and once ambition and power were close enough, I would slough my mentor and carve for myself. Maybe.

  But in truth, I think I was only like the warrior in the antique story the Moi tell, who straying in the cave of the dragon, and finding it too large to slay, lies down before it on the pile of gold, and swears fealty till the moon goes out.

  5

  The city months were longer than those of the tribal calendar, and possessed of more elegant names. In the early days of the season they called White Mistress, the first of the low mountain snows covered Eshkorek, turning the fulvous city and yellow terrain to leaden white.

  All that winter I was a bronze-mask, Erran’s bond soldier and horseman. I perceived that if I had chosen to serve one of the three princes, Erran should have been my choice. For, by the standards of the city, he was rich in many things: slaves, grainfields, horses, and also herds, driven to pasture on the lower slopes all summer, and directed home in autumn. Even their winter feed he had provided for, along with food for his strongholds in Eshkorek. It was not astounding that angry though the princes were at the capture of their prize, myself, they held their wrath in chec
k. More often than not they would need to deal with the leopard during the cold months. Though there were constant clashes between the soldiery of this or that lord, and no man went abroad by night without a goodly company and some measure of sharp steel, Nemarl and Kortis never spoke rough to Erran.

  The ancient order was on the wane, this much was sure. Kortis and Nemarl clung to their traditions, wore their phoenix-faces, spoke of lost greatness, and ate behind screens; Erran the Leopard spoke of the present, which mare was to bear the stallion, which field must lie fallow, which soldier should advance his rank, and every dusk his captains feasted and drank wine in the wide palace hall, among the crimson candles and the half-nude serving wenches.

  Most days I would be in the horse-park. There was a bronze-mask equerry, an alien from So-Ess. Part of the five-city army that attacked Eshkorek, he had been snared in the fighting, but he was well used to bondage now, and took a pride in Erran’s fine stables. This fellow taught me more about horses in a month than I had reckoned to learn, having been on and off them since I could walk. He was known as Blue-Sleeve. Erran, having him wear the blue color of So-Ess, had spiced the dubious privilege with an appropriate title. Blue-Sleeve appeared to accept this pleasantry, indeed, he gave no other name to those who asked.

  The horse-park also provided Erran and his court with game and hunting. It had been some long-dead noble’s retreat at the edge of Eshkorek. Erran got it by a trick, and held it currently by weight of numbers. Most of the mansions in this far-flung quarter had missed the cannon blasts and the ensuing sacks, when firstly Purple Valley and next the Alliance of White Desert raped the city, before drawing off to quarrel among themselves.

  When I was not with the horses, there were games of dice and chance, or the more cunning variety that entailed checkered boards and pieces of onyx, ivory, and green jade. Books, too, were to be had, bound in fine leather for the lower orders, though the golds stuck their masks into volumes of yellow metal, crusted with gems.