Then he fell. His knees buckled, his head bowed, and he tumbled forward into the dusty street. His helmet rolled beneath the feet of the stumbling bearers.
The commoners cried out and began to flee in wild confusion. The bearers set the throne down and knelt, covering their faces with their hands. The courtiers and priests milled about, uncertain. Only the soldiers stood, stolidly, guarding their king who shouted words no one could make out and writhed like some drunkard or madman, tearing, hurling his metal-feathered robe aside, clawing at the dirt.
Overhead, shutters slammed closed.
Still the bearers knelt, calmly, knowing they had failed in their duty, while the prefect of the guards struck off their heads one by one. The youngest bearer wept, but he did not try to run away.
A soothsayer pushed his way through the soldiers and also knelt, trying to read the future in the spreading blood, but the prefect struck his head off too, lest he succeed.
Then the priests gathered around the boy-king in their black robes and black, beak-visored helmets, resembling nothing more than vultures gathered for the feast.
A more prudent soothsayer, watching from a balcony, remarked on this.
The priests dared not lay hands on the King, for they knew that he was touched by the gods, and when the gods touch a ruler so explicitly on the first day of his reign, it is an awesome portent. At such times, the whole history of the nation might be written anew.
And it was a holy thing. They let the vision run its course and waited patiently for more than an hour until the King sat up, dazed, and held out his hands to be helped to his feet. In silence the priests brushed him off as best they could and led him back to his throne. His helmet had been lost somewhere in the confusion. He sat with the wind blowing through his yellow hair. There was dirt down one side of his face.
The priests raised the throne up on their own shoulders.
* * * *
It was only much later, after King Yvorian’s father had been properly laid to rest in the necropolis of the Eagle Kings by the shore of the Crescent Sea, that Kaniphar, the chief priest, took the boy aside and asked him, “Mighty One, what did you see?”
“I saw the gods,” said the young King. “I saw them as the poets describe them, huge and insubstantial as clouds, reclining on their couches as they moved men and armies across the face of the world, like pieces on a game board. All the while they were laughing. Then, as they turned and saw that I was among them, a god who had the face of a dog leaned down to me and said, ‘Behold, thou shalt wager with Rada Vatu.’”
“Many are the forms and aspects of the gods,” said the priest. “It could have been any one of them that spoke to you.”
“It does not matter,” said the King. “Tell me of Rada Vatu.”
The priest grew pale. “Majesty, I am afraid.”
Then the King spoke in a low, grim voice, and for an instant it seemed that the dread former monarch had returned in the person of his fifteen-year-old son.
“The foremost of my priests must never be afraid to serve me.”
Kaniphar fell to his knees and the King touched him lightly on the head, as if to bless him, but said nothing more, and the high priest was truly frightened.
“Very well then,” he said. “You shall learn of Rada Vatu.”
So, all night beneath the uncertain light of hanging lamps, the priest and the King pored over ancient books and unlocked many secrets, and spoke of Rada Vatu.
“This One is older and mightier than all the gods,” said the priest, “and it is ill luck to even speak his name. For he is the lord of Death and Time and Fate, and those are three of his other names. Sometimes, when the gods are at their games, a playing piece suddenly vanishes from the board. That is because Rada Vatu has taken it. Then the gods are silent and thoughtful, for they know that one day Rada Vatu will sweep them all away with a wave of his hand. In the end the gods are as men, and Rada Vatu erases them like old figures traced in the sand.”
“But Rada Vatu shall wager with me!” said the king, leaning toward the priest, whispering in a low voice like a hiss.
“Yes, he does that. He is a trickster, and fond of games.”
“I shall beat him,” said the King. He jumped up, knocking his chair over backward. He paced back and forth in his excitement, striking his fist into his palm. “Surely this means I shall be the greatest of the Eagle Kings—!”
“Perhaps so, Majesty.”
“No! It means more! It means I’ll be greater even than the gods, and Rada Vatu will treat me as an equal. He won’t snatch any playing pieces away from me!”
Now Kaniphar the priest was beside himself with terror and he shook his folded hands and wept, and his voice broke as he begged the King to put aside such thoughts.
“Majesty, know that Rada Vatu is Death and that he comes to each of us at the ending of our days, but not before.”
King Yvorian turned to him fiercely. Another vision had come to him, not from the gods, but out of his own mind.
“No, in my case it will be different. Rada Vatu shall come to me on my own terms, like an envoy I have deigned to receive.”
* * * *
Just then the gods looked down from their game and paused. One or two started to laugh, but were swiftly hushed into silence.
* * * *
The next day King Yvorian (who had appointed a new chief priest that morning) gave the first of a seemingly endless stream of orders. The kingdom was transformed. Royal heralds shouted in every square in every town. Before the palace, trumpeters blew blasts, then the gates swung wide, and the armies of the Eagle King strode forth, to subdue and extract tribute from all the lands bordering the Crescent Sea, from all the islands, from all the cities on the banks of the rivers of the hinterlands.
The wars went on for years. Meanwhile, the people groaned under the exactions of King Yvorian, who taxed away the wealth of the rich and conscripted the poor for their labor.
The King began to build. A palace like none the Earth had ever known rose in the capital of the Eagle Kings. Some said it was the King’s very vision, a madman’s dream made solid out of stone and wood and glass. Fantastic towers rose, and onion-domed minarets, and among them sat the colossal image of King Yvorian himself on a carven throne, as high as a mountain, carefully placed so that on the first day of the year the sun rose directly behind the King’s crown, radiating his glory to all the world.
Inside, winding staircases turned so subtly that the eye could not follow them, until they ended up nowhere at all. There were rooms of gold and of silver, and chambers filled with clouds from which strange voices issued, and corridors suffused with red light, with green, and orange and blue. In one vast hall was only darkness, an enclosed abyss, infinite, bottomless. In these endless rooms amid the twisting corridors a whole other kingdom awaited the King’s desire, a glittering court populated by bird-headed men and impossible beasts, by beautiful, nearly divine youths and maidens, all constructed of humming metal and a kind of marble that was somehow soft and warm and seemingly alive. There was, too, a library, with floor, ceiling, and walls, and even the shelves mirrored. The mirrors angled through time. The reflections multiplied the books until the library contained all that ever had been written, or ever would be, to an infinite number.
But nowhere in all the huge palace, which was greater than a city, would the King permit any clock or hourglass or other means to telling time. Nor would he allow anyone who entered there to speak of persons who had died—the new chief priest acted as if he had never had a predecessor—for the palace, he said, was a labyrinth designed to confuse Rada Vatu, and time and death were banished from it.
* * * *
When he was twenty-five and had fathered a score of sons by his many wives, King Yvorian retired to his labyrinth. He entered alone, without any priests or ministers, for they were not like him, he said, but ordinary men who would inevitably age and be swept away by Rada Vatu. But he, in the prime of his manhood, was to remain agel
ess forever, so that Rada Vatu would come and wager with him.
For a while, the King spoke to his ministers through a pool in the silver chamber, in which he could see their faces, from which their speech drifted up like something shouted in the depths of a cave. But the greyness of their beards and the weariness of their faces distressed him, until he could bear to look on them no more.
He devoted many years to pleasure in the company of his deathless, lifeless youths and maidens, in rooms filled with strange scents, with vapors and waters that brought impossible ecstasies.
Then he turned to his books, and a faceless automaton read to him the exquisite poetry of the ancients, and the sere, harsh words that are to come in the world’s last age, when the sun is already dead and the remnants of mankind retreat into metal pyramids miles high to escape the darkness and the monsters which have inherited the Earth.
And his thoughts were troubled, and he sent the automaton away, then read by himself for a while before withdrawing into the black room, the walled abyss. There he floated, his mind detached from his senses, and he pondered many things. He knew pain then, and shame, and he repented his follies, his excesses, his thousand petty cruelties.
He began to dream, there in the darkness, and his spirit drifted, and it seemed he looked down on the turning Earth for century after century, as the history of mankind slowly passed.
Then he was walking, naked and cold, among the tombs of the gods. He looked down once, and realized that the dust stirring around his feet was not dust at all, but suns, countless billions to be kicked aside with each step.
The tombs rose on either side of him as if to line an endless avenue, black, vaster than worlds, silhouetted against faint stars and glowing nebulae, each of them carven to show some aspect of the god therein: an upraised hand, a bull’s head, a cross, a salmon leaping.
Still King Yvorian journeyed along the avenue, among the dust of stars, until the tombs on either side of him were featureless and empty, their doors left open. At last there were no more of them, and he came to those grey, infinite plains which have never known the tread even of Rada Vatu.
His mind emptied, all thoughts, all knowledge, all pride pouring out like water onto the hungry sand—but a single spark remained like a final star in the endless night, the realization, the voice within him: Yes, I am the greatest of all. I am worthy to treat with Rada Vatu.
That was enough. It brought him back. He swam up, out of the darkness, out of the dream, out of the black chamber.
He stood in the silver room, by the pool, staring down into the motionless water. He wore only a plain white robe and was barefoot, for he knew that Rada Vatu was never impressed with finery. His own reflection showed himself unkempt but unaged, his yellow hair and beard wild, but his face as unwrinkled as it had been on the day he first entered the labyrinth.
“Surely I am ready,” he said aloud. “Surely Rada Vatu will come to me now.”
“I have been with you all along,” said a voice.
The King whirled around, searching for the one who spoke. But he was alone in the chamber. Carvings of men and beasts stared down at him from the walls, but he knew them incapable of speech. He walked toward a far corner of the room, away from the pool.
“Liar!” he shouted. “I have not allowed you to enter my house until now. I have shut you out.”
“No, I have merely spared you.”
“Show yourself!”
Dust and plaster sprinkled from the ceiling, rattling on the marble floor. Then a draught billowed behind a tapestry. A hanging trembled like shaken bones. Darkness and dust whirled together and rose like a miniature whirlwind, then formed the likeness of a man clad in a black robe and barefoot. The face was that of Kaniphar, the chief priest Yvorian had slain on a morning long before.
“You!” He retreated back toward the center of the room.
“It is I.” The voice was a cold whisper, like the wind between the tombs of the gods.
Then Rada Vatu tore away his Kaniphar-face like a mask and revealed the glaring visage of the former tyrant, Yvorian’s father. And the King retreated farther, until he stood against the edge of the pool.
Rada Vatu removed his father-face. Now his head was hollow like a hood, filled with pale blue fire. Two brilliant eyes floated there, like tiny stars.
“Why…why have you come?” said King Yvorian.
Rada Vatu strode to the edge of the pool, leaned down, and touched the water with his hand. The clear pool became blood-dark.
The King scurried away from the pool, across the room. Rada Vatu stood there, gazing into the water, his back to Yvorian.
“Do you not know? I have come to wager with you.”
The King regained some of his composure. “Yes. Of course. I knew that.”
“And I know all that you do,” said Rada Vatu, “for I can peer into your mind even as I peer into this pool.”
“Yes. A wager.”
“Even so. I desire sport on occasion.”
“A wager.”
Rada Vatu turned around, and the fire of his face was blinding white, and his robes were white too, resplendent as the sunrise. Only his eyes were dark, huge, like shafts into an abyss.
“This is my wager, King Yvorian of the Eagle Land: that you shall cast aside your glories of your own will, that you shall no longer even call yourself a king, that in the end you shall know yourself to be as other men. Until that time, I shall not touch you with death.”
“Then I am truly immortal,” said King Yvorian. He laughed loud and long. “It is an absurd wager. I accept!”
The King rubbed his dazzled eyes, looked again, and saw that Rada Vatu was gone. But the pool was still the color of blood.
* * * *
Because he no longer feared death or time or the touch of Rada Vatu, King Yvorian emerged from his labyrinth. It was a long journey to the gate. He walked for many days, still clad in his plain robe, barefoot, his hair wild, but wearing the beaked crown of the Eagle Kings. At last he came to a corridor he barely remembered, then into a darkened, pillared hall filled with debris. Rusted chains dangled where lanterns had once hung. Dust and leaves covered a tarnished throne. Some of the great roof beams had fallen, and even a few of the pillars. He climbed, then wriggled his way toward the outer door. Mice scattered before him, rustling under the leaves.
The door was gone, the doorway itself misshapen, like the mouth of a cave.
King Yvorian stepped outside, into the warm sunlight, onto soft grass. To see living grass again and a blue sky and trees rising around him seemed, for the moment, to be more a marvel than all the blackness of the outer spaces, all the infinite suns, all the tombs of the gods.
He walked a little ways, then turned to look back. He saw no palace, no colossal image of himself, no capital city, nor even the doorway from which he had emerged, but only a grassy hillside. Before him, a plain stretched all the way to a line of mountains which rose like an island glimpsed across the sea, a blue smear on the horizon that might be land, or perhaps a cloud. He found a path and followed it. The sun and wind on his face, the warmth of the earth beneath his feet were all startling, wonderful.
The path turned sharply around the hill. Suddenly a dog blocked his way, barking. King Yvorian jumped back, startled. He had nearly forgotten what such a creature was. He reached to touch it. The dog snapped at his hand, but then retreated, whining, puzzled.
The dog ran to a boy of about eight years and hid behind the child’s legs. The boy wore a patchwork of wool and leather. He carried a staff.
“Who are you?” The boy’s speech was strangely accented.
King Yvorian stood up straight and said sternly. “Do you not know? I am Yvorian the mighty! I am the king of legends! I rule all these lands!”
“You talk funny,” said the boy. He turned and ran down the path, the dog running after him.
Yvorian continued on for several hours, until the sun began to set behind the blue mountains and the air grew cold. At last
he sat down, exhausted, marveling at the motion of the sun and the darkening sky. He slept by the side of the road on a pile of leaves and grass. When he awoke at dawn, he was stiff and sore, and weak with hunger. All these things were stranger to him than any of his dreams or visions within the labyrinth.
That morning he passed through a forest of scrubby trees and reached a village. Huts of stone and wood lined a single street. He walked among them, turning to either side, recalling the tombs of the gods.
Slowly the villagers emerged to stare at him, clad as the boy had been in leather and wool. They gathered before him, filling the street.
“Bow down before me,” said Yvorian. “I am your King, returned to you at last.”
At first the villagers just gaped. Some shook their heads. There was a low murmur of whispered questions.
“Behold! I am Yvorian of the Eagles! I am the greatest King of all! I command you!”
Then the child from the day before pushed through the crowd, tugged on the sleeve of a village elder, pointed at Yvorian and said, “That’s him!”
Some of the villagers began to laugh. Others turned away, embarrassed or afraid. “A madman! A madman!” someone shouted.
The King raged at them. He shrieked for them to be still. He grabbed a man, then another, shoving them to their knees. But each merely leapt up again, laughing and shouting.
Yvorian struck about with his fists, truly like a madman in his fury. The villagers caught hold of him and beat him with clubs, tearing his robe, snatching the crown from his head. He fell to the ground, blind from the blood streaming over his face. Still the villagers kicked him and prodded him with their clubs.
Before he lost consciousness, he heard a woman say, “I wonder who he is, really.”
A man said, “Where did he steal that crown?”
* * * *
King Yvorian wandered for many days, ragged, covered with dirt and blood. He came to other towns, but no one would recognize him as king. Always, people laughed at him, or turned away sadly, or made signs to ward off evil. Sometimes their speech was strange, and he could not understand what they were saying at all.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack Page 13
