Chieftain of Andor

by Andrew J Offutt

  Again Lahri smiled; it was slow and restrained, her smile; far from effervescent. She was very, very sure of herself, confident with power so certain, it was casually held. She nodded; his head turned in the indicated direction.

  The girl, bouncy and rippling of breast and plump of belly and bottom, wore a ridiculously low orange skirt supported by two thin, black straps that crossed on both her back and chest between the jiggling halves of her bare bosom. She entered with quick, flatfooted steps, bearing a carafe and goblets on a small salver. Her eyes were directed floorward.

  “Her, then,” Lahri said in a casual tone.

  Fascinated by the girl, Cleve jerked his eyes and his attention back to the seated sorceress. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I asked you to show me your power. Use her.” She tilted her head at the girl without looking at her; the girl was filling the silver goblets from the silver carafe.

  “No,” Cleve said. He accepted his wine with a smile at the slave Lahri seemed to consider so expendable. “Thank you.”

  Lahri cocked her head to gaze at him. “No? You refuse?”

  “Of course I refuse.”

  “Why? That — ” again she jerked her head “ — is only a slave.”

  “That,” Cleve said, wishing she would sip her wine so that he could quench his thirst with the lovely amber liquid, “is a human being.”

  “She is a slave!”

  Cleve smiled. “I remind my gracious hostess that in Sharne, all but Sharnese are considered slaves. I was in the slave pens when my lady Lahri first saw me. How many artisans, cooks, poets, engineers, even physicians are in that animal pen? This girl had parents, who loved, and she was born. Surely she has intelligence. Even barring that, she serves well and is most pleasant to look upon. Reason enough not to destroy her.” He stood flat-footed, holding the chased goblet in his left hand, and his gaze met Lahri’s directly.

  She stared at him; her slave had departed as silently as she had entered, through a tall paneled door that closed with a muted thump behind her wriggly backside.

  “You are a man,” Lahri said. “Had you started to slay her, I’d have stopped you. You are a human being in a world of beastly slavers.” Suddenly she frowned. “Who — are — you?”

  “Has my lady of Karikal ever heard the name Doralan Andrah?”

  “Doralan? A clan unknown to me. No, I cannot recognize the name Andrah, either. It has a most foreign flavor. Where — ” Frowning, she bent forward, her pale-eyed gaze very intent. “You are Doralan Andrah! But also Cleve … Robert Cleve? From … another world!” Her eyes had widened; her reserve faltered. “And you know not where Doralan Andrah is from!” She sat well foward, her hands tight-clutched on the arms of her black-lacquered chair. “How is it that you are two men in one body?”

  “I — hm. I have not shown you my power, Karikal Lahri, but you have just demonstrated your own.”

  She smiled. “Yes. I can tell you no more now,” she said, rather sadly. “But yes. I see into minds. Tell me — are you in truth a sorcerer?”

  “Please taste your wine,” Cleve said. “I am suffering from thirst.” He waited until she had sipped, perfunctorily; her mind was on him, and his mind, and she was uninterested in the fruit of Andorite vines. He drank deeply. “Thank you. No, I am no sorcerer. I may have powers here — if I can implement my knowledge from that other world you see in my mind.”

  “I thought as much,” she said, gazing intently at him. “But I do not see; I saw. It comes in flashes, Cleve.”

  “Are you a sorceress?”

  She stared, then laughed. “Oh gods, oh gods! An intelligent man, and daring! How long since anyone has dared to say anything even approaching that to me — and you practically ordered me to drink, too … because you are too mannerly to drink before your host! What a strange mixture you are, Cleve! How many mixtures!”

  “You did not answer,” he said quietly. “I think you are not a sorceress at all. You are a handsome woman, very confident, with a power granted to few on any world, in any time: You can hear thoughts within the minds of other persons. That alone is power — if the possessor is clever, and highly intelligent.”

  Her laugh was a silvery sound like water over rocks sparkling in the sun. “An intelligent man, and daring! There is not one in Sharne. All hold me in awe, and few think. Our rules claim dominion over a world we have not begun to explore, because we are surely the greatest maritime power in the world. And to see you, to have that glimpse of your mind! A moving, working, crystal vision, rather than the murk and fog I am accustomed to. It swirls in the mind of our king … ruler of the World!” Her voice was scoffing; a sharp-edged weapon he knew she kept fine-honed. “And the slaying of the Orimors?” she asked.

  “I have a weapon,” he told her. He resisted the impulse to pat the pouch on his left hip. “It is dangerous to others. There were other men with me; they — have power. They took the bodies and — left.”

  She nodded, leaning slowly back. A lonely woman, a witch who was not a witch, not a Starpowered One, but who had so used her gift that she was feared and respected and kowtowed to like some ancient Chinese empress. On Earth she’d be written of in the newspapers, perhaps with her own column, called from place to place to demonstrate that which set her apart and made her a freak — alone and apart. Here she used that ability, similarly, but with more dignity. And still it set her apart, as she had probably wanted, in the beginning. Now she had achieved her goals — and learned of the loneliness that goes with high intelligence or an unusual gift. And certainly with both of them combined.

  And she had found her intellectual peer. Cleve gazed at her, a woman a very few years his senior; she was perhaps thirty, perhaps twenty-nine or thirty-one.

  “I wonder now if the queen is a witch,” he said. “You have answered me with your silence — which I shall keep.”

  “I believe you will,” Lahri said. “But it doesn’t matter. Go about Sharne saying that Karikal Lahri is not a witch, and you will be laughed at — and probably killed, by some groveling, mindless worm of a man who will come here to tell me how he has proved his devotion. But — yes, Her Majesty is a witch, a Starpowered One, and dangerous. I will tell you this: I am not dangerous to you, Robert Cleve.”

  He bowed his head with a little smile, trying to show at once gratitude and unconcern. He succeeded; again he heard the lovely, bubbling sound of her laughter.

  “You are concealing something,” Lahri said, “and I shall not probe after it. Your friends on the mountain … if the Witch of Karikal promises only goodwill and silence, will you tell her your history?”

  Cleve drank again. He stood on the soft crimson carpet before her, breechclouted and barefoot, since his Orimor-fur boots were with the rest of the coldsuit he’d given Barke. “Your pardon, my lady of Karikal, but … what do I know of the word, the promises of the Witch of Sharne?”

  She regarded him in astonished silence, her gaze as much one of wonder as of astonishment. “You tell me straight out — couched in pretty words, but straight out, nonetheless — that you don’t trust me! Do you know that men have died for much less?”

  “I have no doubt of it,” Cleve said, smiling a tight smile.

  Again she cocked her head. Her austerity gave way to a whimsical smile, almost girlish. “Cleve, Cleve? Or Doralan … what shall we do? We fence with one another to no avail, yet we are each fascinated with the other, and each of us knows he can be of value, one to the other.”

  “How can I be of value to you, Lahri of Karikal?”

  “Shall I tell you?” Her eyes sparkled with girlish fervor. Then she said quietly, “You are a man, and I meet few. I remember one, six years ago … You can be of value to me by taking dinner with me, by talking with me, by sitting up far into the night and drinking wine as we talk.”

  His brows were up. “And how can the Witch of Karikal be of value to me?”

  She half-rose, her knuckles white on the carved arms of her chair, her face tightening with
the anger that turned her eyes dangerously scintillant, cold as the northern ice they resembled. “Don’t push me too far, Cleve /Andrah!”

  “You are oversensitive, from years of being treated as a queen — by those for whom you feel only contempt. Make up your mind, Lahri.”

  She sank slowly back, again with astonishment and wonder in her eyes — and respect, and admiration, and perhaps … “My value to you? You are here, not in the slave pen. You do not know where you are from, Doralan Andrah, or where you are going, because — you have been ensorceled! Do you not know that dark powers granted by the stars themselves have robbed you of your memory?”

  Cleve stared at her. He felt as if he’d been struck forcibly just below the sternum by a great, ice-gloved hand,

  “And … you can … ”

  She nodded. “Of course. Memories can be transferred, or locked, but never do they leave the skull of their first possessor. Yours have merely been locked up in a comer of your mind and the door closed and locked against you.” She smiled. “But not, I think, against me.”

  “I think it is past time you invited me to sit,” he said.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to assert yourself there, too. Please sit down, Cleve of Earth, Doralan of … someplace.”

  He sank down onto a chair; hers was tall, and padded, and set to face the door like a throne in which she rested to greet and doubtless strike dumb and fearful all visitors.

  “What is your price?”

  “My price, Cleve of Earth?” Slowly her smile widened. Her serene self-possession was returning; she was again in control, and she knew it. “You must perform a service for me, a mission that will take you not far and present little danger. It will take nearly a month.”

  He pursed his mouth. “To know that I am going to know all of it, all that I’ve forgotten … and to have to wait a month. No — I will agree if it can be done simultaneously, my mission for you and your opening of my mind’s dark comer.”

  She nodded. “Exactly!”

  “I agree, then. Must I climb the mountain for an Orimor pelt?”

  “Oh, Cleve! I told you it was nothing so dangerous! Nor must you leave this house. It is as I said: Dine with me, talk with me, sit late at night drinking wine and talking, that each of us might share an intelligent mind for a while.”

  It seemed a strange phrase to apply to one so queenly, but it was the best he could think of. There was mischief in her clear, pale eyes.

  “That girl, the one you insisted on bringing from the slave pen,” Lahri said. “Why?”

  And he knew. He lifted his shoulders. “A whim. She seems a sweet enough child. The queen caught the prince with her, and sold her at once. She was twice used last night, and I promised her my protection. If I had left without her, I’d have failed to honor my promise — too, I’d have raised her hopes and then shattered them. She’s had enough such blows, I think.”

  Karikal Lahri studied him, and once more her eyes were near-invisible with those long, slitted lids. “I do believe you are telling the truth,” she said, shaking her head. “Extraordinary! Do you always honor your promises?”

  He did, and he did all in his power to put nothing else in his mind, to broadcast the thought, as he told her, “I try.”

  “You do; your thoughts just flashed in my mind again. Well, then. We have a bargain. You will want a bath, and some clothing, and then we will sit down and sup together, Doralan Andrah. And then we shall go about learning who Doralan Andrah is.”

  Doralan Andrah nodded. He arose and went to be groomed.

  21 - The Memory of Doralan

  For the greater part of an Andorite month — twenty-eight days, the cycle of the nearer moon and of Andorite women — Robert Cleve tarried in Sharne with Karikal Lahri, and he shared her table and his warmth, and they enjoyed each other’s company to the fullest. He felt he knew what she wanted, this lonely, childless woman who’d found no man worthy, and he hoped sincerely that she knew what she was about and would indeed have, in nine months, something to show for her bargain with him; something other than the memories she would keep always, to recall and cherish.

  Lahri farmed out Barke’s request and pelts to a lesser witch — a genuinely Starpowered One, Lahri pointed out, who if she but knew, could remove the Witch of Karikal from the world in a trice with one simple spell. She reported back, that second witch: The deed was done, though Lahri would not tell her guest of Barke’s request; it was a professional secret, she told him, and tumbled back laughing on silken sheets.

  Her black-garbed brother treated Cleve with the utmost respect, and Cleve saw nothing in the man’s eyes to indicate enmity toward his sister’s conquest. Only Zamph went abroad; Lahri’s paleness of skin came from her never venturing out of her palatial home, save within the curtained palanquin carried by the four huge black men. It aided her image, she told him, as he had not needed to be told.

  She set two “lesser” witches to work on his problem, and sought to solve it herself via the simple road of hypnotism and telepathy. She caught only fleeting sparkles of his lost knowledge, but one night, the twenty-first, he woke from a sleep that had grown increasingly troublous. He sat suddenly erect in bed, his eyes wide in the darkness.

  He was Doralan Andrah, the Doralan of Doralan, Grof of Mor and of the allied clans of Elgain, and thus Morgrof of Elgain. He saw Biyah, and mighty Stek, and the clan chiefs, and he saw the smiling Witch of Khoramor and her ambitious brother. He saw a time when the night was dark and alive with a thousand natural scents, his room darkened and beautiful with draperies and carved panels and filled with the mingled redolences of incense and perfumes and many flowers. A night of romance and necromancy, a night of Doralan Andrah and Khoramor Shansi. He remembered, feeling it again, and he remembered dozing, overwhelmed with fatigue. And then he remembered waking naked and without Andorite memory, on that raft abroad on Sky River.

  “What — what is it, my love?” a voice asked; the voice of another witch, another enchantress, one who also possessed a brother, but whose ambitions were far more womanly and far more noble and far less consequent — to the world, though not to herself — than Khoramor Shansi’s.

  Cleve told her.

  In the moon’s light striding boldly through the window, he saw a tear, a single, glistening tear, on Lahri’s pale cheek.

  “It is done, then, and not through me — an enchantment of one of the others of Sharne has taken effect to overcome your old ensorcelment.”

  “Yes,” he murmured, touching her small and very feminine shoulder. “Tell me, Lahri — did you really try?”

  She threw her arms around him; he was hard and muscular and trembling with the return of a lifetime of memories, rushing back like a great tidal wave engulfing the shores of his mind in the darkness … the darkness that no longer shrouded his brain.

  “Oh, Cleve! Oh, my lord! I have tried, I have tried! I swear to you, I swear to it. Beat me, trample me, but don’t doubt me.”

  He patted her quivering back. “I do not doubt you, Lahri.” he told her. “You still haven’t learned to know insults from jests — it comes from having been too long a queenly sorceress! But — hush. Sit back, and let me tell you who I am, what I am, and how I came here.”

  She sat back to gaze at him in the moonlit dark. Her face was nearly invisible to him, save where the moon kissed her left cheek.

  He paced the room. “I must get back there. Elgain cannot be reached by sea. I know where it lies from the sea, but as Doralan Andrah, I’ve never seen it. I can draw a map, and fill it with what I know now, as Cleve, although I’ve little idea of distances. I know who set me out on Sky River, who took my memories in the night, and I know how she accomplished it. I was warned! As to the rest of it, the exact how and what she did, and how long ago — no, there I am blank, for I was unconscious.”

  “A witch?”

  He nodded. “Khoramor Shansi. Her brother Shant was my rival for the throne of Mor in Elgain. I believe she desired that power more than
he, although I can’t imagine either of them holding the clans together. Oh, God — what’s happened there now? What, after my disappearance? What of the Clan Doralan?”

  “She loved you? You love her? You gave her something of yourself?” Lahri’s voice was soft and tiny in the darkness.

  “That last, yes, in a moment of perfumed insanity. But love? No, there was none of that, not on either side. She’s a temptress, my love, even as you are. But with purpose far more devious — don’t think I don’t know yours. She set out to entrance me and I succumbed willingly, though warned. Oh, I was warned! Doralan Andrah’s memory knew, but I could not bring myself to believe in sorcery other than natural science, despite his memories. No, Lahri, there was no love.”

  Realizing her hurt and her fear, realizing what had dictated her question, he went to her and cupped her shoulders in his big hands.

  “Only infatuation, and a falling. There was no such love as we have, Lahri.”

  And again she hurled herself against him, straining close. She was stifling the sound of her sobs, but he felt them quaking her body.

  “Is it done, Lahri?”

  “What?” She spoke against him, her face hard-pressed to his strength.

  “You know. I must leave. I wish I could leave tonight. But there’s our bargain, too — is it accomplished?”

  She sighed, still trembling with inner sobs, and he remembered, abruptly and without meaning to, the tearless girl named Jaire, who saw with her mouth and her throat as Lahri saw — sometimes — with her mind.

  “I … think so,” she said. “How can I be sure, yet? But — the time is past.” Her voice was quiet, sad, a girl’s voice, disappointed but resigned. She released him and sat back, her legs tucked up, her knees peeking from her gown. She gazed up at him. Now his face was invisible, while he could see hers in the moon’s light; he had circled the room in his restless excitement, to stand with his back to the window.

  “I signed the papers the day after you arrived and sent them to the magistrate,” she told him. “You were never a slave, of course, but in Sharne … I ‘freed’ you, and have the papers for you. Thus, you can leave here as a free man. As to the method — I shall have Barke here in the morning. Bluerover’s captain has died of pneumonia, but not before telling the owner Barke should succeed him. The owner lost no time clearing Barke of that ridiculous conspiracy charge. He is master of Bluerover now. You and he can work out a course of action.”