Hall of the Mountain King

by Tarr, Judith

  He wavered. She tempted him. She lured him with a vision of splendors that would be. Freedom, joy, a throne at last. And no Odiya to make his life a misery.

  He shook himself heavily, hands to head, breathing rough and hard. “No.” His fingers clawed. He tore them away. The pain was less than the marks of his mother’s hand, than the burning cold of her stare. “No. Too late. It was too late the day my father named Sanelin Amalin his heir. This is only the last movement of the long dance. I must finish it. I will be king.”

  “My lord,” Ymin began.

  “Madam,” said Odiya, “the king has spoken.”

  “He has sealed his destruction.” But Ymin’s strength had faded into mere defiance. She was trapped here; her back knew that guards waited beyond the tent, armed and braced to take her.

  Moranden might have let her go. Odiya would never surrender so precious a captive.

  She glanced about, swift, desperate. She drew breath, mustering what magery she had, focusing it in her voice.

  “Spare yourself,” said Odiya.

  She spoke a Word. Ymin was mute, without even will to struggle. Odiya took her slack hand. “Come, child.”

  Ymin could not speak, nor could she resist, but she could smile. It was not the smile of one who had surrendered, nor was there any fear in it, although she saw her death in Odiya’s eyes.

  She met them levelly. She made them fall. Her smile grew and steadied.

  oOo

  Alidan drew herself together. Horror, having darkened her mind, now swept it clear. She knew what she would do, and what she must.

  Captor and captive emerged from the tent. In their moment of blindness between light and night, Alidan sprang.

  Demons and serpents, a body too sinuous-strong to be human, a gleam of deadly eyes. The knife pierced flesh, caught on bone, tore free. Breath broke off sharp in Alidan’s ear.

  Iron fingers wrenched the hilt from her hand and locked about her throat. Too many fingers, too many hands beating her back and down. Firelight blinded her.

  “By the gods!” a man burst out. “A woman.”

  “Ho there! The queen’s hurt. Quick, you, fetch a blood-stancher!”

  “Enough!” rapped the voice Alidan knew too well now, too strong by far for a woman sorely wounded. “She has but scratched me. Move back; let me see her.”

  The circle of shadows widened and fell away, but their eyes lingered on Alidan like burning hands. She thought of covering her nakedness; she thought of laughing, and she thought of weeping.

  She had failed. She had slain herself for nothing, not even for a savorless vengeance. They would die together, she and the mute motionless singer.

  A new shadow loomed over her. A suggestion of great beauty, an aura of great terror, a tang of blood.

  “Goddess,” whispered Alidan. “Goddess-bearer. ”

  “Who are you?” The words boomed in her mind.

  “Woman.” She smiled. “Only woman.”

  “Who?” pressed the queen who was not. “Who are you?”

  “Lost.” Alidan’s smile faded. The sorceress bent low, eyes alarmed to cleave her soul. The goddess dwelt in them, all dark.

  “But,” protested Alidan, “she is not—she is not all—” No use; the sorceress could not know, would not. No more than she would know who, or why, or whence.

  There was blood bright and lurid on her black gown, pain in the set of her face, wrath and power in her eyes. Great wrath, for with blood she lost strength, with strength the power to work her sorceries. Yet her power was great enough still to deal with this frail madwoman; and it promised torment.

  Terror gibbered on the edges of Alidan’s mind. Madness coiled at the center. Ymin’s eyes burned between.

  Words flamed in them. Run. Run now.

  Wise fool. There was no escape for either of them.

  The singer stumbled. Her body lurched against Odiya’s, striking the wounded side.

  The woman reeled, blind with pain. Ymin’s eyes, Alidan’s feet, met and clashed and chose. Alidan bolted into the night.

  oOo

  As the stars wheeled toward midnight, Vadin eased himself into Mirain’s tent.

  Ymin was gone. Mirain lay alone, sprawled like a child, smiling faintly in his sleep.

  Vadin settled beside him. It was not a thing of conscious thought. Mirain was warm and sated, fitting himself into the hollows of Vadin’s body, sighing even deeper into sleep. But Vadin woke nightlong, guarding his dreams.

  oOo

  Mirain passed without transition from sleep into waking. One moment he was deep asleep; the next, he met Vadin’s stare and smiled.

  That was unwonted enough to freeze Vadin where he lay. The king looked bright and clear-witted and almost happy, freed for once from his morning temper. Today, his eyes said, might be his death day; it might mark the first great victory of his kingship. Whatever the end, now that he came to it, he welcomed it.

  Although it was barely dawn, most of the camp was up and about. None of them seemed to have had any more sleep than Vadin had. And all of them, soldiers, squires, lords and captains, were grim-faced, hollow-eyed, as if they and not Mirain would be dead by evening.

  He was light and calm. He ate with good appetite; he smiled, jested, wrung laughter from them all. But it died as soon as he turned away.

  Nuran and Kav took him in hand, bathed and shaved him, plaited his hair and bound it about his head.

  While they were occupied, someone hissed from the door. Adjan caught Vadin’s eye. The arms master’s face was set in stone.

  Moving without haste but without tarrying, Vadin emerged into the cold dawn. “What—”

  He stopped. Adjan supported a second figure, one to which, even cloaked and staggering, Vadin could set a name. “Alidan!”

  It was all he could do to keep his voice low. She was naked under the mantle, her hair straggling, matted with mud and blood. But her eyes were the worst of it. They were quiet, they were sane, and they had lost all hope.

  He tried to be gentle. “Alidan, what’s happened?”

  “I left my mark on the western witch,” she answered him, soft and calm. “She will have no power to betray my king.”

  Vadin’s anxiety went cold. He could not even take refuge in incomprehension. He was too far gone in magecraft. He knew what she was saying; he had begun to suspect what she had left unsaid. She rejoiced in what she had done: black treachery, betrayal of all honor, and perhaps the one hope of Mirain’s salvation. But her joy was turned all to darkness.

  Adjan said it, short and brutal. “They have the singer. If she’s lucky, they’ll have killed her quickly.”

  Vadin’s feet carried him toward the ashes of the fire. He stood over them. There was no life in them.

  Adjan and Alidan were warm and painful presences at his back. His stomach wanted to empty itself. He exerted his will upon it; with dragging reluctance it yielded. “Why?” he demanded of Alidan. “Why did you do it?”

  The woman closed her eyes. It was too dark to see her face; her shape in the gloom was stiff, her voice level. “We were not together. I was going to rid us of the rebel. I wounded his mother instead. The singer was going to persuade him to surrender. His mother overcome her. She was mad,” said Alidan who for revenge had walked naked into the enemy’s camp and blooded her blade in a witch’s body. “She trusted in her singer’s power, and in a few nights’ loving long ago. He was her daughter’s father, did you know that? He never did. Now he never will.”

  “Damn her,” whispered Vadin. “Of all the people in Ianon—she knew what it would do to Mirain. She knew!”

  “If she had succeeded—” Alidan began.

  “If she had succeeded, she would have shamed him beyond retrieving: she would have proved that even his lover had no hope for his victory.”

  “It would have prevented bloodshed, and won him a mighty ally.” Vadin tossed his aching head. Women’s logic. Damn honor, damn glory, damn manhood—nothing mattered but the winning.r />
  He flung up his fists. Alidan did not flinch. She said, “It was a sacrifice. Now the woman of Umijan must die. Now the old king shall be avenged. You speak of shame; what do you call my lord’s folly in suffering his assassin to walk free?”

  “She may not only walk free. She may rule us.” Vadin knotted his hands behind his back, lest he strike the madwoman down. “Get out of sight and stay out of sight. I’ll keep this from Mirain for as long as I can.” He groaned aloud. “Gods! She was supposed to be one of his judges. Adjan, can we rescue her before the sun comes?”

  “No.” Adjan was quieter than Vadin, and much more deadly. “There’s a solid wall of sentries around the camp. They let one woman go; they’re keeping the other. She’s their best weapon, and they know it.”

  “It may turn in their hands.” Obri the chronicler stood at Vadin’s elbow as if he had always been there, no more perturbed than ever by Ianyn size or Ianyn temper. “May I offer a thought?”

  Vadin snarled at him; he took it for assent. “The king has prepared his mind, no? It is all on the battle before him. Let it stay so. I will go in the judge’s cloak, if someone will cut it in half for me.” His teeth gleamed as he smiled. “After all, I need to see it to write of it. The singer is indisposed. Poor lady, she loves too much. She has broken, her friend is with her, they will not weaken the king’s courage with their tears.”

  “Mirain will never believe it,” Vadin said. “Another woman, maybe. Not Ymin. She’s royal born; her heart is Ianyn iron.”

  “But,” Obri persisted, “the king was born in the south, where both men and women are gentler. While he has the battle to think of, he will have less leisure for questions; I will see that he asks none.” And when Vadin would not soften: “Trust me, young lord. I was hoodwinking princes when your father was in swaddling bands.”

  “What in all the hells are—” But Vadin was conquered.

  Obri grinned, bowed his mocking bow, and melted into the night. In his wake he left a flicker of amusement, and an image of an infant wrapped from head to foot like a spider’s prey.

  Vadin shuddered. “Go on,” he snapped to Alidan. “Vanish. And you, Captain: stay as far from the king as you can. And pray that we carry it off, or we’re all done for.”

  They obeyed him. He was rather surprised. He paused, steeling himself, and went to face Mirain.

  oOo

  He seemed not even to have noticed Vadin’s absence. His squires were arranging the last fold of his scarlet cloak.

  Almost before they were done, he turned with that unmistakable grace of his, and paused. His armor lay all in its place, cleaned and burnished. He ran his finger along the edge of his shield, toyed for a moment with his helmet’s scarlet plume.

  Abruptly he turned away. They watched him, all of them. He lifted his chin and smiled at them, bright and strong. They parted to let him pass.

  oOo

  On the easternmost hill of the camp an altar had risen in the night: a hewn stone banked with earth and green turf. The sacred fire burned upon it, warded by the priests of the army, Avaryan’s warriors armed and mantled in Sun-gold.

  Already before Mirain came to them they had begun the Rite of Battle. Ancient, half-pagan, its rhythms throbbed in the blood: blood and iron, earth and fire, interwoven with drums and the high eerie wailing of pipes. They set Mirain upon their altar, anointed him with earth and blood, hedged him with iron tempered in the god’s fire.

  Standing there on the height, with the rite weaving above him and his mind struggling to weave itself into Mirain’s, Vadin gazed through the other’s eyes across the dawn-dim hills. The enemy’s fires flickered, growing pale as Avaryan drew nearer, but in the center near the tall scarlet pavilion of the commander a torrent of flame roared up to heaven.

  Men massed about it. Nearest to it a lone shape, encircled by cowled figures, moved in what looked to be a strange wild dance. It was terrible to see, black patched with scarlet, and its movements were jerky, a parody of grace, like the dance of a cripple.

  Vadin did not know it. Would not know it. Prayed with all his soul that it was not what he feared.

  Even as he watched, the flames leaped higher still. The dancer whirled; music shrilled, high and maddening. The fire writhed like hands clawing at the sky: hands of flame, blood red, wine red, the black-red of flesh flayed from bone.

  They reached. They enfolded the dancer. They drew it keening into the fire’s heart.

  Sun’s fire seared his face. Mirain’s face. The priest lowered the vessel of the sacred fire and turned the king eastward toward the waxing flame of Avaryan.

  Mirain raised his hands to it. The words of the rite flowed over him and through him, and mingled there, shaping into a single soul-deep cry of welcome, of panic-pleading, and at the last, of acceptance.

  “So be it,” sang the priest. And in Mirain’s heart, and in Vadin’s caught willy-nilly within: So be it.

  oOo

  By the Law of Battle the champion must ride alone to the place of combat, accompanied only by his judge and his witness. They rode at Mirain’s back, Obri’s brown robe and Vadin’s lordly finery hidden beneath mantles of white and ocher. White for victory, ocher for death. In one hand Obri bore the staff of his office: a plain wooden rod tipped at one end with ivory, at the other with amber.

  They did not speak. Obri had been as good as his word. Mirain accepted the chronicler’s presence; he was not fretting over the absence of his singer. All his mind fixed firmly on the battle before him.

  The army had taken its ranks behind them, the foremost marking the edge of the camp: near enough to see, too far to help. The space between grew wider with each stride, the sky brighter, the enemy closer.

  Moranden’s lines were free still of shadow or illusion, as if the sorcery had failed or been abandoned. But his following was very large for all that, the full strength of western Ianon and the Marches. If Mirain had had a second army, he could have overrun their lands behind them.

  If he won this battle, he would rule them all unchallenged.

  A small company left the ranks, approaching Ilien from the west. Vadin urged Rami forward between Mirain and the river, though what he could do without even a dagger, he did not know. Die again for Mirain, he supposed.

  But he saw no weapons among the riders. The herald rode first, mantled in white and ocher, carrying the judge’s wand. Directly behind him came Moranden on his black-barred stallion, riding straight and proud, cloaked as was Mirain in the scarlet of the king at war. And at Moranden’s back rode his second witness, the Lady Odiya unmistakable even huddled and shrunken behind a swathing of veils; and her ancient eunuch leading a laden senel.

  Vadin and the herald reached the water together, but neither ventured into it. “What is this?” Vadin called across the rush of Ilien. “Why do so many come to the field of combat?”

  “We come who must,” responded the herald, “and we bring your king what he appears to have mislaid.”

  The eunuch rode forward, dragging the reluctant packbeast down the bank and across the stream. Vadin knew the shape of the black-wrapped burden: long and narrow, stiff yet supple, with the shadow of death upon it. But he was like a man in a dream. He could do nothing but what he did: give the rider space to come up but none to approach Mirain, and wait for what inevitably must come. Without word or glance the eunuch tossed the leadrein into Vadin’s hand, turned, spurred back toward his mistress.

  Very slowly Vadin slid from Rami’s saddle. He had not planned for this. He had not been thinking at all since he woke. He knew only that Mirain must not see. He had to fight. He could not be grieving for his lover. Or raging for the loss of her.

  For a wild instant Vadin knew that he must bolt, he and this silent dead thing. Bolt far away and bury it deep, and Mirain would never know.

  Someone moved past him, someone in royal scarlet, small enough to slip under his arm, swift enough to elude his snatching hand. Mirain reached for the bindings.

  Vadin trie
d again and desperately to pull him back. He was as immovable as a stone, his face set in stone. The cords gave way all at once, tumbling their contents into Mirain’s arms.

  She had not died easily, or prettily, or swiftly. Vadin knew. He had seen her die, driven into the goddess’ fire. It had left only enough of her body that one could tell her sex, and one could tell that she had suffered before she died, beaten and flayed and perhaps worse still.

  But neither fire nor torturers had touched her face, save only her eyes. Beneath that twofold ruin her features were serene, free of either horror or pain.

  “How she must have maddened them,” Mirain said, “dying in peace in spite of them.” His voice was mad, because it was so perfectly sane. Calm. Unmoved.

  He lowered her with all gentleness, drawing the black wrappings over her, as if she could wake and know pain. His hand lingered on her cheek.

  Vadin could not read his face; his mind was a fortress. Vadin’s strongest assault could not break down its gate.

  The herald’s voice rang over the water. “So do we recompense all spies and assassins. Think well upon it, O king who would send a woman to slay his enemy. You see that she failed. You shall not escape this duel of honor.”

  Mirain stooped as if he had not heard, and kissed Ymin on the lips. He said nothing to her that anyone could hear.

  He straightened, turned. Although he spoke softly, they heard him as if he had shouted every word. “You were not wise to do this, my lady Odiya. For even if I could forgive you the murder of my singer, you have shown Ianon once more what you would do to it and its people. Ianon may endure your son hereafter, but you have lost all claim to its mercy.”

  She answered him with deadly quiet. Wounded though her body was, her voice was strong. “You are not the prophet your mother purported to be, nor the king you like to pretend. You are not even a lover. So much she confessed while still she had tongue to speak.”