The Carnelian Throne

by Janet Morris

  “What are your betrothal vows?” he blurted out.

  “Son,” grunted Quendros between strokes that would have felled whole trees, “you’re a miserable risk, not much in the way of temptation to a woman’s eye. What have you?” He leaned upon the ax and wiped his sweat-soaked hair from his eyes. “Not even your life’s sure. You’d have her to ask, y’know. ’Tis not my place to intervene. But these battle-brink couplings are often born of desperation. Nothing comes of them but grief. If I were her, I’d not hear you till you’re back from Othdaliee. And then maybe I’d not.” He snorted, hawked. “But I’m no woman.”

  “And it would not anger you?”

  Quendros regarded him narrowly, stroked his just-shaven chin reflectively. “Now, that’s up to you, isn’t it? What you make of it, I mean. If you’re not out to harm her, and if you’d be to her what a woman requires of a man, who am I to object? But if you’re deceiving me ...” He leaned close, so close Deilcrit could gauge the procession of rot in his front tooth. “Then I would ... do whatever seems just. I’m no Wise Woman, to read the future. It’s on you, to read your intent.”

  Deilcrit drew in the dust with his booted foot, then met Quendros’ glare once more. “I cannot say what I will do. That is what I have been trying to tell you .... Things are happening to me that I cannot control. I want a thing, and it occurs and brings great trials, and then I must want something else to survive the trial, and then I am in worse straits than before. I cannot say ....”

  “Why not wait and see?”

  “I cannot.” It was wrenched from him through clenched teeth. “I must either have her, or leave this night.”

  “That bad, eh?”

  Deilcrit grunted an affirmation.

  “Well, ask her mother, boy, is all I can suggest ...” But Kirelli’s abrupt descent wiped the rapine grin from the big black-haired man as if it had never been.

  “Oh, Kirelli,” Deilcrit pleaded silently, “please, not now.” And with a soft “Kreesh, breet,” the whelt circled once about his head and was gone heavenward.

  Filled with thanksgiving, he squinted after the receding dot until it was lost in the greening sky. Then he turned from Quendros, who again chopped wood with a fervor that spat chips, and hurried to the hut, that he might speak with Heicrey’s mother before his courage left him or Quendros changed his mind.

  Lohr-Ememna dashed his hopes into sharp, glittering shards, and as if she sensed this, she was excruciatingly careful as to where her words trod: “Deilcrit, I cannot, as a Wise Woman, condone this match. It is to be hoped that you will understand that Laonan vows are sacred vows, and that if you later care to take up the study, things might change.”

  They both knew this to be an excuse. Her tired countenance pleaded with him not to press the matter.

  He retired to ponder whether Woman’s Word could be binding upon him if the Woman herself was not bound by his laws.

  Then, decided, he chased down Quendros, who wandered by the cliff’s edge where crumbled Nothrace overlooked the sea.

  There were tumbled buildings once tall as the maze around Dey-Ceilneeth, great ways of rubble among which quenel and roema, their smaller, scavenging cousins, hissed and spat and slunk. There was a spray salty in his nostrils, a drizzle blown inward from the sea that intensified as midday and its rain approached.

  When Deilcrit came upon him, around the twisting of a hovel’s one remaining angled wall, Quendros was seated on a heap of clay bricks, listening to the thunder of the waves as they sought to climb the cliff’s face.

  To his right and rear, Othdaliee squatted, as always enwrapped in mist and cloud. She is not high when judged from land’s height, but at the Northrace ledge, where her skirts drop sheer to the sea, her true proportions are revealed.

  He sat by Quendros’ side. His face must have bespoken his disappointment.

  “We will leave soon, then?” ventured Quendros, scanning the choppy waves far below.

  “We, or I.”

  “We, lad. You have my word. But the day is half-spent. Rest another night.”

  He squeezed his eye shut upon hearing that, and knew he did not have the strength to refuse.

  “If you must,” he acquiesced without emotion, suddenly very tired.

  Quendros clapped him upon the back and rubbed his shoulderblades. “That’s a good one; it never pays to fight fate.”

  “Are you sure?” he retorted, somber.

  “No,” murmured Quendros, rising abruptly to stretch. “I am not sure. I am sure of less and less the longer I live. But of one thing I am sure: even one woman cannot flaunt another in matters of the heart. And speaking of matters of the heart, I have some deep matters to discuss with Lohr-Ememna before I take the trail. She is a difficult taskmistress, but her touch fortifies.” And he stretched a stretch that creaked bone, and set off down the ruin-strewn street.

  He spent the midday there wandering among Nothrace’s ghosts, turning a chunk of rubble here, a bleached bone there, seeking some feeling that might tell him he was home. He peered in twice a score of empty doorways, even three which were not empty. In one of these the door was slammed in his face. At the lintel of two others he was forced to explain his presence. Each time, he used the Laonan/Laore exchange formula he had heard Quendros use with Amnidia.

  Only later it occurred to him that he might have been endangered. At the time, he was calm and secure and unconcerned.

  He unearthed a verdigris-eaten knife hilt in an empty, three-windowed but of stones calked with clay. Its floor was three concentric sunken ledges, and it was in the bottommost of these that he was kneeling, scratching among the soft, loose dirt. The top half of a skull and some far-scattered human bones told him how the occupant had died: the skull casing was shattered, bones cracked for marrow. He lounged easy under its mournful stare, digging in the cool sand with the ancient knife.

  Outside, the steady drum of afternoon rain commenced, and all around him the shadows, lost definition. But he was dry and warm within the hut, which leaked in only four places. He spent a long time watching the water drip from among the ceiling stones, wondering how the rocks could have been cajoled into assuming the arch of, an inverted bowl.

  She tinkled: “Deilcrit, I have searched everywhere,” and ran lightly down the stepped flooring.

  Her red-gold hair was darkened, plastered to her head with rain. Water streamed from the end of her braid. She reminded him, in that moment, her face alight with joy and dappled with raindrops, of the spirit power Estri. He shook the specter aside, reached up, and sluiced a drop from her nose. “How dare you chase after me in the rain? Your mother will have both our hides.”

  She blinked at his severity, and crouched beside him, pressing her head to his chest. He took her tiny, icy hands, both of hers in one of his own.

  “Please do not send me away,” she pleaded, her lips finding his throat.

  “In daylight? Never.” He chuckled, and set about extricating her from her sopping robes.

  She was not the fine-honed Estri, nor the soul-sating cup that was Mahrlys, but her slim thighs hugged him and her shapely arms wrapped him around and her hard little belly heaved with her abandon.

  Mindful of his predicament, he sent her home and waited a suitable interval, hoping that she obeyed him and bathed before entering her mother’s presence.

  He was lying back, counting the moments’ passage and enduring his arm’s complaint of the dampness, when the whelt alighted in one of the three shutterless windows.

  “I have been expecting, you,” he said, almost relieved. “Was it you who routed the fhrefrasil just beyond Mnemaat’s Wall?” Three more whelts appeared in the window just left of Kirelli’s perch.

  Deilcrit ignored them. “Was it?” he demanded, and opened his mind to Kirelli as if he did it thrice a day before meals.

  A whisper sounded within his inner ear, and though he looked upon the silver-beaked whelt in the window, a flowing mass of visions passed leisurely across his sight, each on
e somehow filled with enlightenment that came in great reams enwrapped in single words.

  The whelt touch whispered “no” and he was inundated with a whelt’s-eye view of what had transpired in the battle with the fhrefrasil. And the respect with which the whelt viewed him, the patience with which it awaited his awakening, told him more than a hundred parables.

  He saw the Eye of Mnemaat, and the carnelian throne pictured therein. “Take it up, for yourself, for your destined conscription into Mnemaat’s service, for us all,” sighed Kirelli’s thought astride a low twittering that filled his ears.

  And he saw Mahrlys, and Eviduey, and what else opposed him. And in an unreeling of the years gone by, he saw what factions dwelt in Wehrdom, what perversions of its strength the Dey-Ceilneeth coterie expounded; what Kirelli’s folk decried and obstructed: “Such determination by the few for the good of the many only services the few. Wehrdom cracks asunder like a melon overripe, and only a digging out of the putrefaction will keep the whole fruit from rotting away.” Thus did he hear the prince of wehrs; but it was what he saw chronicled of that long struggle which cried out to him that here was no choice but a duty.

  Or was it the part of him that had been readying itself for this moment since his birth?

  This final horror, the fear of losing self that had crippled him thus far in his journey, having gasped out its ultimate defense, slunk away before Kirelli’s desperate fury.

  The whelt hopped to the earthen floor and danced upon it, wings outstretched, kreeshing. Behind, others filled its vacated perch, and in the third window the paws and slitted eyes and tiny black fingers of quenel and roema and even a ptaiss’ twitching ears could be seen.

  But Deilcrit saw only the whelt Khali, who had so long sought his bond.

  And through those squawks and squeaks and the mind-touch that deciphered them he heard the tenets of those of Wehrdom who sought him, and found them to be acceptable, conversant with his own. The blur that was Kirelli’s wings aflutter showed him a great maw yawning amid the sharp-spired gardens of Othdaliee, and he heard tell of the wonderful creations housed within. And the danger. And the death that was not death, but a different sort of life.

  And he shuddered then, and unconsciously drew his limbs about him, as the whelt danced the details of his days in the packed earth of a Nothrace ruin.

  But the whelt’s intelligence spoke on: of the shadowy unknowables, of might-be and must-not-be, of the unalterable limits within which all to follow must take place, or die stillborn.

  “Some have flown by and seen that the portals are still open, but all haste! Soon Othdaliee will be impassable, closed up for a thousand years.”

  “And what if the doors should close?” He formed the wehr-thought hesitantly, discomfited by the easy proficiency his mind displayed.

  “If the door should close,” twittered the whelt, its head cocked, green eyes blinking, “then Mahrlys and Eviduey and theirs will triumph and you and I and all who oppose them shall perish in the greatest wehr-rage Aehre-Kanoss has ever suffered. Wehrdom shall be only one-sided, and that dedicated to the endurance of the group who will then rule her.”

  “And what,” stormed Deilcrit’s wehr-voice, ringing in all their inner ears so that Kirelli hopped backward and squawked in alarm, “of Imca-Sorr-Aat? Has not Mnemaat a hand to lend?”

  “Mnemaat is no more. Imca-Sorr is an empty title, a vacant throne with no presence worthy of the honorific ‘Aat’ to guide it.”

  “I see,” said the wehr-voice of Deilcrit, and he did.

  There passed between them then some assessment of dangers awaiting, and all the while the wehrs gathered, until when at last he extended his arm to Kirelli and the whelt flapped to his right shoulder, the windows were black with them.

  Careful of the whelt riding him, he walked up the ledges to the hovel’s door. Around the stone but they crowded, ptaiss and fhrefrasil and campt and berceide and even ossasim and guenel and roema. He heard the far-off wailing of fear from the but whose door had been shut in his face, and he grinned without humor and reached up and smoothed Kirelli’s raised crest.

  He halted for a moment before those gathered to pay him homage, then made his way through them to the over-look where he had previously sat by Quendros and pondered questions whose answers had not been in man’s ken.

  Those adherents of Kirelli, those wehrs who were also his, followed after like the white wake of a bark.

  At the very edge of the precipitous drop he halted. A thousand lengths below, guerm churned the water, phosphorescent, wriggling like snakes in a basket, slithering on one another’s backs, leaping from the surf that they might better see what scanned them from the cliff’s height.

  After a time, he waved his hand and the sea subsided. He turned to the gathered wehrs, dismissed them, and they were gone.

  Then he strode through the rubble of Nothrace, with Kirelli on his right shoulder, toward the but wherein awaited his human ally, Quendros.

  But when almost upon it he slowed, and spoke gentle commands to Kirelli, and sent the whelt to wait in the trees that circled the hovel round.

  The reason that he did this was a portent in the form of shrill and angry voices, that split the air of the waning day.

  It was Lohr-Ememna’s voice that was the loudest, and hence her tirade which first made sense to him: “... And if you want to succor some red-eyed hairy bastard, you go ahead! But not in this house! I will not have it. The shame! I—”

  Then Heicrey’s falsetto bleat: “Father, do not let her make me do this. I beg you. Please!”

  And Quendros at the same time: “Silence, the both! Let me think!”

  And though there was not silence, there was moderation of tone, and he could make out no more words, just voices and Heicrey’s sobbing wail.

  With a curse upon the sharp noses of women and their power, he sneaked to the hut’s door and flattened himself beside it, attempting to sort matters out in the light of what Wehrdom had revealed. Mahrlys’ face came to him as if her very presence hovered beside. At length, not pleased with what he had discovered, and not knowing what he would do, he took advantage of a break in Lohr-Ememna’s marginally lessened ranting and shoved open the door.

  The three froze, Lohr-Ememna with her mouth open.

  Heicrey’s shivering form was huddled in a corner, her whole countenance red and swollen, hands balled into fists, hugging herself.

  Lohr-Ememna wrung her fingers and closed her mouth.

  Quendros looked very slowly over his shoulder, as if to make sure he in the doorway was really Deilcrit. Then, his lips twisted in disgust, he raked his hand through his hair, ordered Deilcrit to shut the door, and strode to the sideboard, where he uncorked a large day rhyton and drank deeply from it.

  Deilcrit leaned against the door he had closed, arms folded, his eyes flitting from Heicrey, who had her fist stuffed into her mouth in an effort to check her hysteria; to Lohr-Ememna, who seemed about to attack with tooth and nail; to Quendros, who had not yet fallen down dead from the stuff he had drunk.

  Instead, Quendros drew near, pushing Lohr-Ememna roughly toward a corner. The woman, with a ptaisslike hiss, sank down there, her face covered by her hands.

  Deilcrit shook his head mutely to the earthen vessel Quendros extended.

  “Drink it, idiot. It’s not poison. You’re going to need it.”

  Deilcrit did that under the pitying, exasperated scrutiny of Quendros, whose great frame rocked with suppressed emotion. “Wise as a guerm’s anus, aren’t you?” he rumbled, low.

  And when Deilcrit only returned his glare with a stricken blink, he ordered him to sit down and have another drink.

  This, too, Deilcrit did, settling self-consciously down cross-legged before the hearth.

  Quendros pulled the padded stool under him, and summoned his daughter with a resounding snarl. Hiccuping, the girl swayed before her father, at his order took seat on the cold hearth’s edge.

  Quenros looked from one to the other and r
ubbed his face with his palms. “Well, you two, you’ve done it for good and fair. Now I’m going to tell you both some things I maybe should have told you before, but—”

  “Quendros, you cannot allow this disgrace—”

  “Woman,” snarled Quendros at his spouse, “I will shut you up if you make me. They don’t understand .... He certainly didn’t know, and you’re deep in this yourself from having kept silent. Now, repeat the tactic, and you just might equalize things.”

  Deilcrit, amazed, twisted around to see what the woman would do, But she was no Beneguan woman: she muttered, only, and obeyed.

  “Now, my spouse is not unjustly upset—”

  “Father!’

  “You, too, amorous one. If you had paid more attention to your studies and less to your puberty, you’d have had enough sense to know without being told, after all that has occurred.”

  The girl started to cry, fat tears racing down her cheeks.

  “All right, that’s not wholly fair, but—”

  “Quendros,” interrupted Deilcrit, fortified by the drink, which with each swallow eased him more, “you know how I feel ...” And he let it hang, because he did not really feel that way at all; not now.

  But, even if a half-truth, it was the right thing to say.

  Quendros smiled glumly. “Yes, son, I know. And it’s a pity, but ... Look: did you know Amnidia was the woman who diapered you cross-country to Benegua? Neither did I. Lohr-Ememna knew, though, and to her that explains why Amnidia sought your death with her own.”

  Deilcrit had that piece of the puzzle: the Laonans esteemed the race of man above all others, and had misconstrued him as its instrument. But he did not say that, or anything. The creature he had been long becoming was wiser than that. It kept silent.

  “Lohr-Ememna couldn’t help overhearing what passed between you two: Amnidia called you wehr, and worse. Do you, as she accused, seek the carnelian throne?”

  Only the day before, he would have been at a loss to answer. He said: “Yes.”