Twilight, running water, beautiful and silky in the dusk. The margin of a great river. In the mud and reeds above waterline human bones are lying, a lot of them, a horse’s skull, a rusted stirrup. Curlews are crying.
Rain. A great number of men, mounted and on foot, trudge across a broad landscape. A faint, continual yapping of dogs.
A hillside in grey weather; in the distance the ruins of a burnt village or farm. King Kammin is in the middle of a furious argument with his generals. They all look worn and strained. We are too far from them to hear what they say.
The Palace in Aremgar in flames. No one fights the fire. The trees of the Palace gardens burn like torches.
Ashthera in deep forest, talking with charcoal burners, men and women who look like shaggy black bears. They are giving him directions.
ASHTHERA: Across the river, or along beside it?
A CHARCOAL BURNER: They was looking for a place to cross when we seen ’em.
Ashthera grins.
A battle at a river ford, in the deep forest. Kammin’s men, a troop of forty or fifty on foot, as they try to cross the river, are decimated by archers hidden among trees behind them on the right bank. One man struggling through the shallows slips on underwater rocks, and two arrows strike his back and neck; he slides down into the water. A long curl of blood in the running water downstream. Only about half the troop is left when they abandon the attempt to get across the river and regain the shore to stand and fight, but there is nobody to fight, the archers have vanished. As they set off downstream, shadowy figures dog them through the underbrush.
Light snow is falling. Ashthera, Romond, Kartari, mounted on gaunt ponies, ride at the head of a ragged troop through a village which looks abandoned, half destroyed; but people have gathered at the end of the street, and are shouting.
VILLAGERS: The king! King Ashthera! Long live the King!
And the weary soldiers grin and walk more briskly.
The ruined, half-burnt Palace in Aremgar, in sunlight. Workmen with planks, a carpenter planing, women planting seedling trees.
Plowlands, the scene of the cavalry charge we saw early in the war: but now, instead of horsemen sweeping over the curve of the fields in a charge, we see a scattered army trudging away from us, shrinking against the brightening Eastern sky.
Hands, planting roots or shoots in wet, dark earth, working fast and skillfully.
The Streets of Aremgar.
In full sunlight, a crowd approaches the Palace from the north, and presently can be sorted out into an irregular but sizeable body of armed guerrilla soldiers escorting the king, and the people of Aremgar welcoming them, with dogs and children everywhere. It is no parade. Everybody is very poorly dressed and many are in rags, nobody looks prosperous; the children especially are skeletal, pot bellied, with bright eyes. But the people press forward to pat and touch the soldiers and to touch the king’s footprints, to hold up their children to see him pass; they laugh and weep and cry out —
THE PEOPLE OF AREMGAR: Ashthera! Ashthera! The king, the king!
Ashthera and his immediate escort, mounted on a motley lot of horses and mules, work forward slowly through and with the crowd, into the open place in front of the Palace gates. The wall stands, but there are no gates in the portal. The palace itself has been partly rebuilt but is not finished; there is a good deal of scaffolding up, everything looks raw and makeshift. Ashthera sits his horse a minute looking at it. His face is expressionless. He dismounts. The crowd gives him room, watching his every move. He makes a formal ritual gesture, as at the altar in Jogen, and speaks loudly and clearly:
ASHTHERA: Now God be praised that we have come home at last in peace!
He goes forward through the gateway to the Palace. Romond, Kida, soldiers, priests, and courtiers follow him.
The Throne Room of the Palace in Aremgar.
There is no ceiling, only newly finished wooden beams across the bright blue sky. The throne is gone; on the dais is a litter of fallen plaster, shreds of burnt tapestry. The king and his party enter. With him is an officious chamberlain.
CHAMBERLAIN: The Throne Room was destroyed in the fire and looting, but as you see, your majesty, it is in the process of being restored—
ASHTHERA: We smoked the rats out, didn’t we?
He goes to the door in the wall that led to the corridor to the Inner Room; no tapestry conceals it now. He opens the door. It opens onto a mess of rubble and scaffolding and a sheer fall. Past the raw corner of a wall are the Palace gardens — a wreckage of mud and lumber.
CHAMBERLAIN: The whole west wing was burnt out and had to be torn down—
ASHTHERA: Good. Unbuilding is the important thing.
He turns away from the door, leaving it open on nothingness. He stands looking around with a peculiar, cold, aloof expression. Romond pushes forward and is in time to support him when he lurches and falls in a faint. Romond lowers him to the floor and kneels by him. Commotion amongst the courtiers. Romond answers their questions and alarmed protests sternly.
ROMOND: He’s worn out, that’s all. He’s tired! Has he slept for the last five years?
A Barracks Room in the Palace in Aremgar.
The room is a little cell, with a low ceiling and whitewashed walls; daylight enters it from a window that looks on a clay wall and the city roofs of tile and thatch. Ashthera lies sleeping on a cot. Romond — thin, and tanned, and needing a haircut, but looking no older than before — kneels at a low table, on which he has opened a small box or kit. We glimpse enameled steel, miniature precision tools and instruments, ranks of tiny vials. He is deftly putting together something which as he turns to Ashthera we see to be a small hypodermic. He gives Ashthera a shot, twists up the hypo in a bit of rag and drops it in his pocket, closes up the kit and slips it into another pocket, and then hunkers over to sit closer to the cot. Ashthera’s eyes are open now. He mutters a few words in which only the word ‘palace’ is distinguishable.
ROMOND: We’re in the east wing, the soldiers’ quarters. It wasn’t burned.
ASHTHERA: This is the Palace. I can’t stay here.
ROMOND: Lie still. You’ll be all right.
ASHTHERA: I can’t stay in the Palace. Let me go.
He struggles to get up, but can barely lift his head.
ROMOND: Where do you want to go?
ASHTHERA: The forest.
ROMOND: But the war’s over. You won it. You’ve come home.
ASHTHERA: This is not my home.
ROMOND: The prize you fought for —
ASHTHERA: Not prize, prison. Earned, not won. Not one, but many, many, many years. Too long. Let me go free!
ROMOND: It’s not I that keep you.
ASHTHERA: Be merciful, my lord. I am your dog.
He does not beg, but prays to Romond, quietly, with tears in his eyes. Romond, serious, circumspect, alert, replies:
ROMOND: You are the king, my lord.
ASHTHERA: I am the king, my lord. Your dog the king. I’ve done your hunting for you. Now let me go. I beg you let me go!
ROMOND: Ashthera, I am Romond.
ASHTHERA: Don’t tie me up here — let me go —
Romond gets up and goes to the door, opens it and speaks in a low voice to someone outside it.
ROMOND: I think we’d better move him out of the palace. My house wasn’t damaged. Ask Lord Kida if the king might stay there while he recovers his strength.
The House of the Traveller.
On the sunny, screen-sheltered porch of the House of the Traveller in the Palace compound, Ashthera lies in a sort of deckchair, looking out into the May foliage. His face is still worn and strained. His hair is short, as it was at Jogen.
Old Jaga brings Batash to the door that leads onto the porch from the house, and Romond greets Batash there.
ROMOND: Don’t tire him.
Batash nods, and comes forward with anxious haste, trying to tiptoe.
BATASH: My lord —
ASHTHERA: Batash!
> They embrace with unconstrained emotion. Romond stands watchful and calm as always.
BATASH: Welcome home, my lord — peace-winner — victor —
ASHTHERA: Are they all well, up there in the fort?
BATASH: They are indeed, my lord. The queen sends all her duty and fond praise to you. Princess Shiros is blooming. Prince Hantammad is tall and strong. And the queen’s brother Harish Ashed still suffers at times from his wound, but sends glad homage and duty to your majesty in this most fortunate and long-hoped-for —
ASHTHERA: (gently stems the tide) And my brother?
BATASH: Lord Bolhan came south with me — he’s here! We would have come together to present homage, but your physician here tells us, one at a time. I know that your majesty’s health is returning, and rejoice that all will go well now —
ASHTHERA: The queen. She is well, Batash?
BATASH: (with sudden simplicity) They were very hard winters in the fort, my lord. (With some return to his florid courtierly manner.) My lord, I am sorry to see you in mourning. (With a gesture indicating his own hair, which is uncut and braided in the usual fashion of men here. After a pause:) A death among your kin —?
ASHTHERA: They were hard winters everywhere in the war. And hard summers. They call the king their father. Doesn’t a father cut his hair in mourning when a son dies, when a daughter dies? Or a thousand daughters and a thousand sons —
Romond interposes very quietly. Batash takes the hint and rises.
Ashthera stops abruptly, with a cold, ironic look.
BATASH: I must not stay and tire you, my lord. I’ll come back tomorrow.
ASHTHERA: Has the queen spoken of coming here to Aremgar?
BATASH: Oh, surely, my lord — after the roads are repaired — traveling is still a miserable business, I can tell you, not a decent horse left for love or money, and the roads like wolftraps, and half the villages still in ruins so there’s no inns to put up at and rest —
Romond is deftly getting Batash to the door as he talks.
BATASH: Be well, be well, my dear lord! I’ll come tomorrow!
Romond returns, and kneeling at a little table near Ashthera, he mixes something in a pottery cup as he speaks.
ROMOND: In the third winter of the war — by that stream, a tributary of the Ram —
ASHTHERA: The Hovad.
ROMOND: Right. The Hovad. In the rain. When we’d lost the horses.
ASHTHERA: And Kammin’s men had got them.
ROMOND: That was the low point, I think. That winter your kingdom was the ground under your feet. You had lost the war. Right?
ASHTHERA: The war, and all the horses.
ROMOND: You smile, remembering it. You smiled then. You were a happy man. In that damned rain and mud, all of us with dysentery, eaten up with lice, you were — you could do anything with us. Your people would have risen from the dead to go on fighting for you. Sometimes I swear they did. You weren’t just strong, you were joyful. Joyful! Now... if you smiled once, the whole month riding home in triumph to Aremgar, I didn’t see it.
ASHTHERA: I’m a crossgrained man, Romond.
ROMOND: And an evasive one.
ASHTHERA: Yes. But I’m getting older. Unlike you.
ROMOND: (evading this) Do you find strength in suffering, and weakness in victory, in happiness?
ASHTHERA: It isn’t that simple. But you know that I don’t play to win. I play to play.
ROMOND: What’s wrong with winning?
ASHTHERA: Same as losing. It stops the game. It’s an end. A barrier.
ROMOND: A barrier to what?
ASHTHERA: To the other side of the river.
ROMOND: Yes, your river....How do you cross a river that only has one shore?
ASHTHERA: There are rafts, they say. Small boats:
Ashthera is watching Romond keenly, a little ironically, as he says this.
ROMOND: Here. Drink this. Spring tonic.
Ashthera obediently gulps the stuff down.
ASHTHERA: Disgusting. — You’re asking questions, as usual; but I think there’s something that in fact you want to tell me. Is that so?
ROMOND: Yes, it is.
ASHTHERA: Go on.
ROMOND: When you’re recovered, I want to leave your kingdom. Travel on, for a while.
ASHTHERA: (nods) You know you’ll be missed. As counsellor, physician, story-teller, question-asker. You know I’ll miss my friend. You know that you’re free to go, and free to return, and always welcome to me. Where will you go?
ROMOND: To King Kammin.
ASHTHERA: To ask him questions, I imagine?
ROMOND: Yes.
ASHTHERA: Very well. But take care he leaves you your tongue to ask them with.
ROMOND: I will.
A pause. Romond sits down on the matting near Ashthera.
ROMOND: It’s not really by choice that I go, you know. I’d much rather stay here.
ASHTHERA: It’s not by choice that I stay. We follow our duty; I blind, you seeing — that’s the difference. Will Kammin know you?
ROMOND: You mean, know that I fought for you —
ASHTHERA: No. Know you, as I knew you.
ROMOND: (cautiously, uncertain) How do you mean, my lord?
Ashthera glances at him, ironic, protesting, and accepting; he makes the slightest gesture of humility — ‘if you will have it so’ — but says nothing. He fetches a deep sigh and closes his eyes, looking tired. They sit side by side in the leaf-broken sunlight, not talking. Romond’s face is puzzled and troubled.
On the Road East
Romond, mounted on a good horse, with bulging saddlebags, rides along a country lane in a misty summer dawn, riding towards the sunrise. As he goes we hear Batash’s voice:
BATASH: Going over to the enemy! Going to visit at King Kammin’s court! It’s beyond me. I thought I knew him. He’s a foreigner. It comes down to that. No matter how long they stay, you can’t trust them, you can’t trust foreigners.
The Throne Room of the Palace in Aremgar.
The room has been repaired and refurbished, with a fine painted ceiling, and there is a new throne, less imposing than the old one — gilt wood, no jewels. The same people are there as were there the first time we saw this room, except for Romond, Harish Ashed, and Fezat. Everybody looks five years older and a good deal shabbier. Ashthera, answering Batash, rises from the throne and comes down among the others.
ASHTHERA: He’s a traveller, Batash. He travels on.
BATASH: What business has he got with King Kammin?
ASHTHERA: The same business he had with us. — I’m for the road too, my lords. At the new moon I’ll ride north to Soya, where the queen is now. I want you with me, Kida, to see that the harvest gets shared out, in the north and center. When I come back, I intend to live for a month in the GreatTemple. Bolhan, you and the Council will continue to see to the rebuilding of Aremgar and the restoration of trade, as you’ve been doing so ably while I was ill.
BATASH: When will you be back from the north, my lord?
ASHTHERA: I don’t know. Autumn I suppose. — Come!
He is speaking to a big hound, a handsome, long-eared, young dog, which happily follows him out of the room, past the wall in which the small door to the Inner Room was; there is no door, no hanging there now.
A Villa in Soya.
It is a summer afternoon in the outskirts of the small northern city of Soya. The mountains of Jogen are a looming backdrop to the orchards and paddocks of a villa at the end of town, in hilly, pretty country. Down in a roughly marked playing court a ball game something like jai-alai is going on, played roughly, with body contact; the players are boys of thirteen and fourteen, hot, noisy, dusty, half naked, shouting. One of them is Hantammad, now fourteen. Farther up the hillside a group of girls sit in the grass under a big, shady tree; they are fifteen and sixteen, their hair braided and pinned up, their clothing light and pale-colored. They are playing dice, and there is a lot of laughing; one girl shrieks—
/> GIRL: Four tigers, Shiros! Four tigers!
Shiros, a beautiful adolescent, laughs and makes a face as the other girl rakes in the winnings.
Under another tree, still higher up the hill, are Ashthera and Tassalil. He is stretched out on the grass; she is sitting rather stiffly by him. Her hair, tightly braided and drawn back, has gone iron grey. She looks darker, drawn together. On beyond them, on the curve of the high bill, Harish Ashed sits all alone, hunched up like a bear.
ASHTHERA: He’s still in pain from that back wound, isn’t he?
TASSALIL: (nods)
ASHTHERA: Is it that that makes him so withdrawn?
TASSALIL: Not the pain. The wound, maybe.
ASHTHERA: (looks questioning)
TASSALIL: It’s in his back.
King Dog Page 6
