Yes, Scribe, I slew my cousin. And, yes, I am speaking of Veraen Antero, and I know what you are thinking, and I am telling you to speak not one word to me, but write all I say, exactly as I say it.
One moment Veraen was on top of me, hitting me with a rock, and the next I was standing and Veraen was motionless on the ground — his neck twisted, his dead eyes fixed in terror and pain.
I stood there, too shocked to feel anything but the sharp knowledge that my life had just plunged from a cliff. Now only evil could follow.
A woman’s voice came from behind me. It was a sweet, lilting voice, that drew me around as if I were a compass head, drawn to the will of Sirens Of The South, who command all direction.
"Rali," she called. "Raaaleee."
She was under the oak, just by the spring. She was beautiful; otherworldly beautiful; goddess beautiful. Her hair was black as night and spilled like water across skin of fresh cream. Her eyes were smoky black with lashes like a dancer’s fan, and they were so striking that for a moment I did not realize she was naked. But she wore her nudity like clothing, as if this were her natural state.
She motioned to me with a long, slender arm. "Come to me, Rali," she said.
So, I went. I felt as if I were floating slowly across the ground. She took me in her arms and I wept for me and what I had done, and I wept for Veraen, for what he had done. Then she raised my head up from those soft, mother’s breasts, and looked me deep in the eyes. I looked back and lost myself in the welcome darkness I found there. All else vanished from my mind.
"I love you, Rali," she said.
Instead of surprise, her words seemed natural — right. I knew that she loved me.
"I have been waiting for you, Rali," she said. And that seemed right, too.
She took me my the hand and led to the place where the spring leaped from beneath the oak’s great roots. We walked into the little pool and a gate opened just where the spring came out and then we walked into her garden, the gate swung shut behind us, and we were standing before a house made of green forest bowers.
"This is your home now, Rali," she said.
And that is what it became. I lived there with Basana for one month short of a year. We were lovers. Basana said she was the goddess of the spring and had fallen in love with me when Veraen had first showed me the spring two years before. It did not occur to me to wonder why. Youth accepts such things blindly — as its due. Except, perhaps, with Otara — and that only once — I never felt such passion as Basana fired in me. I say this as a woman of much passionate nature, which is a trait all Anteros share. It is our greatest weakness. She enveloped me in love: gave me gifts, sang me songs, fed me delicacies, praised my beauty, my wisdom, my nature, my all.
“I forgot my home and family — indeed, all the world I came from. Until one day when I tried to rise from the bed of blossoms she made fresh for me each night, and found I could not. I was so weak, I could barely lift a hand, or voice a call for help. And when Basana came into the room, her loving smile became a hungry snarl.
She came to the bed, and pinched my flesh all over, saying: "So sweet, so sweet."
I tried to weep, for I knew I had been betrayed, but could only shed a single tear. Basana giggled when she saw it, and kissed it away. Her mouth lingered, but not from love.
Then she rose, and said: "Don’t cry, Rali. I’ve fed you on love for nearly a year, and now that you’re ripe you mustn’t complain, because it’s my turn now."
I tried to move, and she gave me a soothing pat. "There, there, dear," she said. "It’s my nature that’s at fault, not you. I have no soul of my own, and require a young girl’s every ten years for nourishment. It’s true, I didn’t really love you, dear Rali, but I had to make you believe I did, or that withered little thing I found by that boy’s body would have been no good at all. The best soul, I’ve learned, is full of happy, love-fed sweetness. Not just flavor, mind. You have no idea, my dear, what wonders it does for my mood. To be so young, and so . . . alive year after year!"
She told me she’d leave my room for a small while to prepare. While she was gone, I could take comfort in the fact that although she did not really love me, of all the girls she’d pretended to love, she’d come closest to not pretending with me.
As she was turning away, I smelled sandalwood and then my mother entered. She was naked, like Basana, and more beautiful, I think. She moved like a panther and fire sheeted from her eyes. The only thing she carried was a sharpened willow switch.
Basana shouted and sprang to meet her — great talons reaching where hands and feet had been before. Her teeth became long fangs snapping for my mother’s throat. Before she could reach her, my mother thrust with that willow stick and it pierced Basana through the heart. Blood spurted from her breast, and she fell dead to the floor.
My mother didn’t look at her but came to me and took me in her arms.
"I’ve come to take you home, Rali," was all she said.
I struggled to rise, but she pushed me back on the bed. She sang me a song, whose words are always at the edge of my memory, but I can never call them up. And she stroked my brow until I closed my eyes . . . and slept.
Veraen’s voice awakened me. I opened my eyes, and found myself lying beside him, beneath the oak. It was just as before. The same warm, summer afternoon. The smells and sounds. He said something silly and I laughed. Then he tickled me, and I tickled back.
I heard my mother’s voice calling me. Veraen jumped away, with a guilty flush. I stood and answered her and she came over the hill. My mother was dressed in a simple short tunic of blue, with blue walking breeches below, stuffed into high boots. As she came near us, I smelled her sandalwood perfume.
She looked at me with her gentle eyes, and said: "I’ve come to take you home, Rali."
And that is what she did.
I told Gamelan that I didn’t know if what happened was real, or a dream. Mostly, I believed it a dream, Scribe, just as you do. You were going to call me mad, when I began this tale, for as all know, my cousin, Veraen Antero, is very much alive with good family and good fortune of his own. Now, you’ll say it was just a dream. A dream of a young, confused girl.
But, sometimes, I told Gamelan, I thought it no dream at all. I thought that I really had been stolen by a wood sprite, if that’s what Basana was, and that my mother had rescued me. One thing — my mother was never the same again. She became weaker, day by day. Until, nearly a year later, she died. On my weaker nights, I wonder if she made a bargain with god or demon — my life for hers.
"And that," I said to Gamelan, "is why I not only fear what you ask, but refuse it."
"I understand your reasons, now, Rali," the wizard replied. "And I’m very sorry. But have you told me all? Is your mother truly gone to you? Does she come to you, sometimes? Is her ghost still near her child?"
I didn’t answer — which for Gamelan, was answer, enough.
He said: "It doesn’t matter just now. You’ve confessed your reasons and your fears. But that doesn’t change our circumstance. If we continue like this, King Keehat will catch us and kill us. Between the two of us, however, we can stop him. We can stop him now, and the only blood that will be shed is his."
Once again, he offered me the feather. This time I took it.
Gamelan smiled: "Get my chest," he said. "There’s a special oil we’ll need, and some other things."
I fetched the chest, found the proper bottle of oil and some dried, foul-smelling powders he said were necessary. Then he told me what to do. As he spoke, I imagined myself going into battle, dousing all emotion, pushing everything from my mind except what he was saying.
At his direction, I chalked a pentagram about the brazier and sprinkled in the powder and oil. Purple smoke gushed up and a demon hopped out. It was small, with leathery green skin, a fanged toad’s face, and the wizened legs and arms of a man — if men had talons and claws. It hissed and snapped at me. Numbly, I handed the demon the feather. He plucked it from my
fingers and leaped back into the brazier.
Gamelan had told me what would happen, but still I had to steel myself as the flames exploded up and out. I closed my eyes as the fire engulfed my face, then my whole body — but instead of burning, the flames were cold on my flesh. I opened my eyes and felt the icy flames lick. All about me were swirling colors, and below me — at the bottom of the brazier — was smoke. I blew . . . and the smoke swept away.
I found myself looking down from a great height at the war canoes. They were still partially hidden by fog, so I blew again and the fog wisped away across the gray seas.
King Keehat lolled in the largest of the canoes. He was being fed by a slender youth, who wore not even a loin cloth. The youth had the breasts of a woman and the private parts of a man. As I watched, the youth dipped food out of a bowl and offered it to Keehat. The king opened his mouth and ate from the man/woman’s fingers, then licked them clean. The youth giggled and dipped out some more. From far away I heard Gamelan urge me on.
"Keehat!" I called. My voice seemed to echo as if I were in a large cavern.
The king jolted up, pushing the youth aside. He looked all about for the source of the voice.
"Who addresses the king?" he demanded.
"Keehat!" I called again.
The king’s head snapped back and forth, blazing eyes jumping from one of his warriors to the next.
"Who speaks?" he shouted.
His men were clearly terrified, thinking their king had gone mad.
"Keehat!" I said.
This time, the king leaped up, and as he did so the youth suddenly became that obscene staff Keehat carried. Keehat gripped it, then shook it at his men.
"Answer!" he shouted, "or you will know my wrath!"
They were all too terrified to speak. Keehat struck the man nearest him with the staff. The warrior screamed and shrunk back as if he had been burned by an intense heat.
"It wasn’t me, My Lord!" the man shrieked.
"Who, then?" the king shouted. "I know you all speak of me behind my back! Calling me mad, or a fool, for this pursuit!"
The warriors were silent.
Keehat struck another man with the staff. The victim howled in agony like the first, and begged his king to please believe him and spare him. But the king pushed him down with his foot and ground the staff into his belly. The man cried out and writhed in pain as the searing hot staff burnt into him.
"Slave like master," I intoned, and my words rolled out like a wave.
Keehat whirled, looking up, realizing the voice came from the skies. For a moment I thought he was looking at me.
He shook his staff at the heavens. “I am Keehat!” he roared. “Who dares defy the king?”
Lightning speared from the tip of the staff, and I nearly ducked as it crashed up. Then I felt the reassuring touch of Gamelan’s had on my arm. The lightning bolt crackled harmlessly beneath me.
"Master like slave," I continued, piling phrase upon magical phrase. I felt a shock of power as I spoke. But it was a power that sickened me and made my head swim as if I were gripped by fever. I dared not stop, for Gamelan had warned that to do so would be fatal. I pushed on: "Like to like . . . Hate to hate. Slave find thy master! Master find thy slave!"
Near the canoe, the water roiled and then Keehat shouted in alarm as the toad-faced demon I’d sent shot up from the spume. The king lashed out with his staff and the demon shrieked in anger as Keehat’s totem charred his flesh. The king laughed and struck again. But this time the demon vanished just before the staff connected.
Keehat whirled this way and that, looking for where the next attack would come from. His men were silent . . . unmoving.
Suddenly, he shouted in fear as the staff writhed in his grasp. Another cry as the head of the staff transformed itself into the demon’s sharp-fanged face. Keehat moaned in pain as the staff seared his flesh. He tried to fling it away.
But the staff transformed into Keehat’s lover. The king screamed when he saw that his womanboy lover bore the head of the demon.
“Master!” the demon hissed in an ugly parody of passion. “Come into my embrace!”
And Keehat screamed again as his lover-slave leaped on him — burying his teeth in his throat.
Not one warrior rose to help as the youth wrapped both arms around Keehat and jumped over the side.
The men watched silently as the water boiled violently. Then there was stillness. Blood floated up to pool around the war canoe.
I heard one of the men say: "Good riddance."
And another said: "Let us call the others, my brothers. Our loved ones await us at home."
I felt a lurch, my vision clouded, and the next thing I knew I found myself kneeling on the deck of Gamelan’s cabin, retching into a bowl as he held my head and whispered soothing words.
When I was done, he groped about a found a cloth dampened with some sweet herb. I wiped my face.
"An excellent first effort," the wizard said, with much satisfaction.
I didn’t answer, or protest. It did not make me happy, but there was no denying that Gamelan had just made a wizard of me.
I felt a bit like I imagine one of my sisters might feel, when she has just become a whore.
The next day I sent out several boats to scout the area in every direction. There was no sign of the war canoes.
No one cheered.
For it was apparent to everyone in the fleet that we were completely and hopelessly lost.
CHAPTER TEN
WANDERERS ON UNKNOWN SEAS
Our disaster struck like a storm demon’s hammer. It numbed all feeling, paralyzed all thought. I doubt there are few alive who know the true meaning of the world lost — or certainly who have known the despair. For most to be lost means standing on a small circle of the Unknown, surrounded by an enormous Known. The correct path only awaits the aid of patience and luck.
My brother once asked Janos Greycloak — who had experienced just about everything any traveler could encounter — if he’d ever been lost before. Greycloak, after some consideration, finally said: “No. But I admit to being bewildered for a month or two.”
We were more than bewildered. Our very sanity was being shaken. The circle we sailed in was nothing but a vast Unknown. True, the creatures of the sea were mostly familiar. The ocean tasted just as brackish. The winds blew as they had before. The sun rose and set on the same schedule and from the same directions. Even a few of the stars were familiar, although so oddly placed no navigator could use them to set a home course. These things did not soothe our guts, calm our lurching hearts, or offer even the most wispy of hopes.
For a time we were all frozen in that nightmare — although even that word is weak. Even nightmares offer the comfort of having visited their drear landscapes before. We did not look, much less think, of our fellows — but only stared out at the empty sea, knowing it was impossible for any wave under our bows to break on a familiar shore.
Numbing fear swept through the fleet like the plague. At first, the sailors — and even my Guardswomen -were listless at their posts; barely hearing orders from their equally demoralized superiors, and what duties they did perform were perfunctory, half-hearted. Accidents and injuries increased, caused by lack of attention; petty squabbles erupted; friendships were tested; and lovers parted, seeking no others to fill the void.
It was Gamelan, our poor, blind wizard, who was the first to shake off the dread.
One day, just at dusk, Polillo, Corais and I were slumped against the weather rail, not seeing, much less enjoying, a spectacular sunset. I was thinking bleak thoughts of Tries and home, while they carried on a desultory conversation.
“What happens when we die?” Polillo moaned. “Our bones won’t know the ground they’re buried in. And what of our ghosts? Will they be as lost as we are?”
Corais shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve heard that a soul can never find rest if it takes flight in such a place.”
Ga
melan’s voiced rasped at our backs. “Who told you that?” We turned, startled that he’d come on us unawares. He jabbed his blindman’s stick in Corais’ direction. “What fool has been lecturing you on the preferences of ghosts and souls?”
Corais sputtered: “I, uh . . . I don’t, uh.”
“Speak up, woman,” Gamelan snapped. “Name the jape.”
“It was Master Klisura, if you must know,” Corais shot back, recovering some of her missing spark. “He has an aunt, who was washerwoman to a witch. Practically raised him — the aunt, I mean — not the witch. So, he’s quite knowledgeable about such things.”
Gamelan was disgusted. “Washerwoman to a witch, you say? Servant to a dog’s mother, more likely.” He rapped his stick on the deck. “It simply amazes me that where the spirit world is concerned, normally rock-solid people will listen to any nonsense from anyone. As long as the wisdom is purportedly from a creature with a warty nose, and an addled manner, why, it must be so!” A sneer creased his beard. “What if I told you my father was fishmonger to an armorer’s grocer? Does that make me expert on the soundness of shields and blades? Would you trust your life on my wisdom?”
Corais turned as scarlet as my brother’s hair. She is not a woman who is easily rattled, and it pained me to see her so embarrassed.
“Leave her be, my friend,” I broke in. “Corais didn’t mean anything by it. She was only making conversation.”
Gamelan was not calmed. “Conversation is just about all that has been made around here for some time,” he snorted. “That and whimperings over our supposed fate. I wish we had let that savage catch us. At least I’d have some peace from all this mewling.”
Polillo was caught by the same barrage fired at Corais. She slumped so much, she seemed to have lost a head in height.
I came to their rescue. “Don’t you two have some armor that needs burnishing, or some blades that require sharpening?”
They leaped on this like kitchen mice on over-ripe cheese, babbled excuses, and scurried away. I turned to the wizard, braced to become the sole object of wrath.
The Warrior's Tale (The Far Kingdoms, Book 2) Page 19
