Riana said the needful words, and the Northerner's form first wavered in the air, then dissolved into nothingness. "So," she said, regarding the empty air where he had stood. "Now he's in dour gray Hallagh. I'll miss him. Such a magnificent figure of a man he was, like Prince Drostal in the epics—'An aspect aptly joining jarring arts, Wherein War smiled, and Love cast deadly darts.' So tall, with such breadth of shoulder. So slim in the waist and loins, so long and straight in the legs. And that smell of his—like an animal's pelt, clean and wild. You have remarked it?"
"I have," Ryel said, a little impatiently.
Riana licked her lips. "I liked it. Very much. How fortunate they've been, the many—very many—women he's pleasured."
"More fortunate still is the only woman he truly loves."
At Ryel's rebuke Riana only laughed. "Belphira Deva hasn't had as much of him as I have, believe me."
"She has all of him."
With a pettish mouth the One Immortal turned her back on the space Desrenaud had once filled so dauntingly, and took Ryel by the arm, impelling him to follow her. "You'll see more than you can stand of your friend Starklander in time to come. Now it's time to begin your education."
Chapter Nineteen
The One Immortal made a careless sweeping gesture at the snowy land around them, and within the space of a minute the winter-world had transformed into sultry jungle where brilliant birds and busy monkeys sang and screeched among the teeming green luxuriance. Now the land surged with sharp volcanic knolls, and glistened with waterfalls. Here and there Ryel descried ruins of great temples and palaces immensely old, and huge uncanny images either fallen or crumbling to pieces under a rank tangle of creepers and roots and moss. Around the pillars of the house, rioting vines veiled the gods and daimons and dancers in paradisial orchids and other tropical flowers bizarrely beautiful, clustered in dense garish masses. The heavy heat was breathtaking, and for an irrational panicked moment Ryel remembered Dagar.
"You needn't gape so," Riana said carelessly over the wild din. "It's an easy enough trick, once understood. You'll learn it."
Ryel wiped his brow, loosened his shirt. "I never thought such Mastery possible."
"I'd be most unhappy if it weren't. I loathe winter. Only for your tall friend's sake did I endure it."
"You seemed not to feel the cold."
"It isn't the cold I mind. It's the bareness. The death." She took a long slow breath of the sundrenched air. "Enough of this foolish girl's form. You wished to see my true self—now you may."
She transformed, her features shimmering. Her fair Almancarian plaits loosened, darkening to glossy auburn-black luxuriance rippling in close-set crimps. Her eyes lengthened and enlarged even as their deep green shifted to a languorous warm copper-gold, while the sculpted planes of cheek and brow rounded and softened. The fullness of the mouth grew fuller yet, and her imperial girlhood aged a seeming seven years, and became so excessively sensuous that they hardly seemed of humankind.
Returned to her own superabundant carnality, she stretched her smooth round arms and began to arrange her hair, using a twigful of flowers to pin it atop her head in a loose knot softened by many escaping strands.
"Ah. So much better. I hate clothes."
She wore none, now; only jewels. Now a dozen strands of pearl wreathed her neck, and bracelets of begemmed gold chimed row upon row at her wrists and ankles. A cincture of gold encircled her hips, its many looped chains ringing with little bells. Rich jewels hers, beggaring any of Almancar's; but they were as nothing to the nakedness they so lightly veiled. Soft cream-tinged cinnamon-brown was her skin, that gave off a spicy redolence not so much a perfume as an inherent scent; and absolutely without blemish it glowed warmly taut over breasts swelling like great fruits, and haunches jutting in large soft prominences beneath a waist perilously slender. Her flesh, yieldingly firm, gave no more hint of muscle or bone than would have a nectarine or a mango; but every limb of her body was pliant and supple as a vine, palpably apt for any flexure however extravagant. Save for the thick luxuriance of her rippling tresses and her delicate eyebrows and densely-fringed lashes, not a hair grew on all her body, and her sex could be discerned as no more than a soft fold tender as a plum-cleft, intermittently visible beneath the bright concatenations of the glittering belt, scarcely more or less provocative than the languorous slits of her heavy eyelids, or the warm division between breast and arm.
Irritated by sudden and urgent thirst, Ryel tried to look away, and angered himself yet more by his inability to do so. "Which of your people's goddesses have you chosen to resemble, my lady?"
"I myself was the pattern for the goddesses that came after me, Ryel Mirai. She smiled with a slow hint of mischief. "You seem too warm."
All of Ryel's body had broken out in sweat, surely caused by the plunge from icy winter to sweltering jungle. "Yes," he said with effort, taken aback by the breathless extremity of that heat, the overwhelming sensual allure of that nudity.
"Come, this will cool you."
Ryel had already observed that a pool of clear water edged the back of the Riana's house. Out of an escarpment of black lava veiled in ferns and orchids a waterfall jetted in silver strands dropping into pure blue transparency, through which glowed white sand and wavering green fronds, all of it irresistibly enticing. Riana dived in with glittering grace, and swam underwater to the middle of the pool, her jeweled body shimmering beneath the luminous blue.
"Come join me," she called to him, flinging back her wet hair as her arms waved lazily amid the water. Noting his hesitation, she laughed, slow and relishing. "Do you fear me so much?"
Ryel turned away. "It isn't fear."
"It is. Your Steppes fear, terror of the flesh. But are you not—" here her voice changed, gentling in a way that made him catch his breath and whirl round again—"are you not half Almancarian, Ryel Mirai?"
Diara of Destimar's incandescent beauty met the wysard's astonished eyes; Diara, hovering amid pellucid sapphire, smiling with that serenity of their first meeting in the dream-realm. And even though Ryel knew that her beloved fair semblance was a feigned one, the knowledge did not help him breathe.
The Sovrena swam to the bank and rose up out of the water. "You're too hot. Come in with me." And very gently she began to unfasten Ryel's shirt, pulling it from the wysard's shoulders.
The wysard shut his eyes, set his teeth. "You are cruel, Riana." He clenched back a gasp as he felt those smooth hands stray from his shoulders to his flanks to his waist, seeking the fastening of the breeches. "Don't. Please."
"Oh, very well. But I'll have this at least." The slim white arms wrapped around his body, drawing him close to wet ivory smoothness; the soft mouth took his in a searching kiss. Bitterly against his will Ryel gave himself up to the embrace, unable to keep from returning it.
"Let go," he whispered.
Kisses on his neck, burning sweet; hands straying down his back; hot urgency whispering in his ear. "You don't want me to. You know you don't."
"I won't allow this." And he wrenched himself away from her.
"You're so touchy, brother. I wasn't going to bite you." Embodied in her true shape now, draped again in her glittering ornaments, Riana released him with much of her wonted unconcern; but a shadow seemed to have passed over her face. "You men and your love. As if it mattered."
"I wish you understood what love is, my lady. It would make you kinder."
She only shrugged, too indolent for entire contempt. "Brother, I have no desire to give my heart again and again, losing it to death again and again. Better by far to spare myself continual hurt. Look at the way you ache for those you love—and you love so easily. So indiscriminately. Michael, who would have sacrificed you to Dagar without the slightest remorse. Roskerrek, who would have cut you to pieces and regretted nothing save the mess it made. Diara, who does not so much as remember you, and Priamnor who has a great deal more on his mind these days to give you more than a passing thought. You must forget them
all. To learn great things you must unlearn the little; to learn the great Masteries you must unlearn the World."
"I will not," Ryel at once replied.
"And why not?"
"Because nothing makes us strong save love, my lady."
"And when did you learn that?"
He ignored the jeer in her voice, turning away from it. "I learned it when Edris lay bleeding to death in my arms, that day we fought in the courtyard. When I realized that I had strength enough to die for him."
Long was Riana silent; and when she spoke again, her voice no longer mocked. "I will never have your strength, Ryel; and that is why I could never have come to the World's help as you did. Nor could I help you when you lay on your deathbed in the house of Gwynned de Grisainte."
Ryel spun around. "What do you mean?"
She gazed upon him unmoved. "When on that first night you lay down in Guyon Desrenaud's bed, you were closer to death than you had any idea. The daimon-bane of the Red Esserns had fatally infected your blood, and Dagar's rai hovered near to seize upon you at the moment of your last breath. The Markessa hoped to cure you, but she never could have alone. She had stolen my spell-book, yes; but she had not my powers, and her Art would have availed little or nothing. But Edris reached beyond the Void and strengthened the Markessa's Art, and it saved you."
Ryel felt a shiver crawl over him despite the intensity of the heat. "In that sleep I had a dream. In that dream Edris killed me."
Riana inclined her head. "He himself sent part of that vision from the Void, although it was intermixed with your own imaginings."
"Did you see it, too?"
"Yes," she said, and now she smiled. "It was remarkably sensuous; I enjoyed it."
Blankly the wysard stared at her. "Riana, he killed me in that dream."
"He killed your sick self only. In the moment his sword-point pierced you, the daimon-evil left your body."
Ryel in a memory-glint regained that brilliant morning of blue waves and sweet salt air; felt the salt in his eyes, stinging hot and wet. "I had a second dream afterward. The ending of the world."
"That was a vision born of your weariness and despair and self-doubt," the One Immortal replied. "But the time for those cruel emotions is past, brother. I will give you in their place strength, hope, self-surety. And more, much more." She slipped her soft gold-laden arms around his neck, urging him down to her lips; and this time he made no attempt to draw away, desperate for warm woman-flesh to slake the violent hungers stirred by that gleaming vision of the Dranthene Sovrena, needful of human tenderness to counter the Dagar-sent ordeals yet burning vivid in his memory. Only one doubt haunted him, now.
"This is beyond my deserving," he murmured into her ambrosial hair as his hands dared only faintly to caress the high-set plentitudes of her breasts, span the impossible slenderness of her waist, stroke the velvet abundance of her haunches, trace with tremulous fingers the spiced silk declivity of her delta.
Her mouth was like fruit of the rain forest, nectarous and savorous and wildly sweet. She caught his hands in hers, pressing them against the flesh he dared not sense to the full, emboldening them to brash exploration. "In my land this is worship, my brother. The gods of Zinaph delight in the couplings of men and women, the affirmation of life. We will astonish the gods, you and I."
There on the margin of the lake, beneath fragrant shade, amid soft luxuriance of grass and flowers they celebrated the life-force, enabled and inspired by bodily strength abetted with Art and lust, enjoyed without the slightest tainting twinge of shame or remorse. Pleasure shook them like bolts of lightning, flash after flash after blinding searing gasping flash, until at sunset they lay amid scattered pearls and discarded jewels, entwined and at peace as the day ebbed in soft pulsations of crimson and gold.
"My lovers number hundreds, but you have surpassed them all," Riana murmured against his shoulder. "The god-heroes of Destimar are all of them joined in you."
Ryel smiled, unable to keep from feeling pride at such praise. "While in Markul I closely studied the pleasure-arts in all their aspects from many a learned book. Never did I dream I'd have a chance to apply my studies so thoroughly."
Riana laughed softly, deliciously. "Never have I met so diligent and thorough a scholar."
He touched his mouth to hers, still greedy for those lips despite an infinity of kisses. "I want you again."
"And you'll have me again, and again." Lazy with pleasure she stretched her arms in a rippling chime of golden bangles. "But now it's time for other matters. Food, and talk, and then sleep, and after that the learning of the Lost Masteries."
Ryel lost all track of the time that followed. Each moment blended into the next like the thousand fragrances that compounded Transcendence, sweet upon sweet. He might have been with Riana a week, or a year. All he knew was that he was happy beyond any contentment he had known in his life. Every hour seemed to add to his Mastery or his pleasure, both explored to heights he had never dreamed possible. Save for his lust, which was imperative and ceaseless, the wysard had no consciousness of any bodily need; he ate and drank and slept only because those actions were delightful, not because he required them. Among other enjoyments, often he would wander among the vine-shrouded lichen-misted ruins naked as a god, his arm about the One Immortal's willow-slim waist, his hand resting on the soft jut of her gem-draped hip , ever and again lingering beneath an embowered archway or atop a crumbling pyramid or under a waterfall to kiss those fruit-sweet lips of hers, or seek her breasts among the ropes of jewels, or wreathe her rippling hair with jasmine. But those toying moments were as nothing compared to the passionate unions in her vast bed, where the Art became amorous and limitless.
When they lay quiet again after yet another interlude, gathered up in each other, Riana touched drowsy lips to his cheek. "If ever I were to love anyone, Ryel Mirai, I would love you."
He treasured her closer against him, thanking her wordlessly. Beyond the wide-flung shutters and doors of the pavilion bright rain fell hard, clattering against the palm-fronds, silencing the wonted racket of parrots and apes and lemurs, refreshing the sultry air. It lulled him asleep awhile, for how long he was not sure; he awoke to dusk. Dashrali was lighting the lamps, and Riana half-reclined on the bed's edge clothed in a length of gleaming many-colored silk wrapped close about her body, her hair rippling unbound to her waist.
The wysard blinked his eyes. "You're…dressed."
She lifted a dusky sweet shoulder. "For a change."
Ryel drowsily reached for her hand and kissed it, breathing its perfume. "What is the scent you use? It never leaves you."
"In old Zinaph royal girl-children from infancy were daily rubbed head to foot with oil of spices now extinct. After a number of years the fragrance would become permanent. But you've slept long, and require breakfast."
On soundless soft-furred feet Dashrali approached with chal and other good things, and set them nearby the bed, then disappeared until only her purr remained in the air, its lingering rumble mingling with the distant growlings of the departed storm.
"Tell me about the Building of Markul," Ryel said, sipping from the emerald-jade chal-bowl she held out to him. "About you."
She nibbled a sweet, dreamily reminiscent. "I came to the Art very young—or rather the Art came to me. A thousand years ago there was no Mastery. A thousand years ago the World was beginning to recover from the worst of its wars, the Black Strife. Most of Cyrinnis was poisoned, and countless thousands died."
"Yes," Ryel said, somber with memory. "I have read of it, and heard."
"But of this you have been unaware: that among those who survived, a few were transformed by those same poisons. They lived, to find their minds' powers magnified beyond anything previously known or believed possible, powers only hitherto imagined in fantastic tales. And perhaps it was those tales of gods and daimons with their ability to command the earth and air that prepared us for the changes we underwent, and made us unafraid to try our newfound abilitie
s to their fullest. Yet to the World we were Strife-tainted monstrosities, inhuman things to be feared and fled from. Markul became our refuge."
"How did you meet?"
"We came to Markul as everyone drawn by the Art comes to that City—inexorably yet inexplicably pulled," Riana replied. "I well remember it, even after a millennium’s passing. Driven from the Zinaph Isles by my people's terror of my Art, I fled to Almancar and took another identity to avoid persecution, becoming a dancer at the Temple of Atlan—for Destimar, a much smaller realm in those days, was the sole land in all the World that survived the wars unscathed, having stayed neutral throughout the struggle. My own home had been destroyed and my family lost—we had been nobles allied to the royal house of Zinaph, but that house had fallen never to rise again. In those days Almancar had no pleasure quarter, and Atlan's temple was the city's chief place of amusement and assignation. With my skills as a dancer, learned from girlhood, and my beauty, which was much as you now see it, I did not lack for admirers. Garnos Basarides was the warmest of them, lately come from soldiering in the Strife up in Munkira, where one of his near kinsmen was ruler. You surely envision the Builders as tottering graybeards, and most of them did indeed live to great age; but in the beginning all of us were young, Khiar of Cosra the eldest of us at thirty—I was twenty-three, two years older than Fleurie of Wycast who was youngest of all. And Garnos was your age when we met, almost twenty-seven, beautiful then as all Almancarians are beautiful still, but to my eye yet comelier for his battle-hardness. Horrors beyond all reason he had witnessed in those dreadful wars, and they had made his eyes haunted and strange; but never could they make them cruel, or trivial, or false. When we looked on one another it burnt me like slow fire; I did not know that part of that flame's heat was the bonding of our Art.
"He bought my freedom from the temple, and I lived with him in his house, learning from him that love is not only gifts and kisses, but trust and laughter and strife and thrown objects and exasperation and…ecstasy." Only her lips smiled, and just barely. "Not long after our coming together, we were both seized with strong presentiments of what lay in store, together dreaming of gray mists and dark towers. Driven by those presages we made ready for journeying, and left Almancar and crossed the Aqqar, not knowing why we went or what our destination might be. But at last after many a lonely mile we reached a place of mists and fog, and among the fog we saw a little band of young men and women dressed in the garb of many lands, sitting together on the ground earnestly conversing. When they saw us they greeted us joyfully, calling us brother and sister, saying that they too had come to the Aqqar one by one, not knowing why. We marveled at our meeting and our immediate communion, for we soon learned that the only thing we had in common after our sense of kinship was our ambidexterity."
The Ryel Saga: A Tale of Love and Magic Page 54
