The Man of Gold

by M. A. R. Barker

  The half-naked young man was apparently confused—or bewitched? He had almost reached the Shen guardsman when suddenly he threw up his hands as though confronted by some terrible apparition. He gave a hoarse yell, veered away, and stumbled over a just-awakening slave. He ended with his back against the western parapet, that which overhung the blackness of the swamp below.

  The first soldier came up to cut his quarry off from any further flight, feinting with his sword but not actually striking a blow. The nobleman must be wanted alive! The second trooper was almost there too, running hard, and the remaining pair were not far behind. The officer cursed and left Tlayesha to join his men.

  The nobleman dodged his opponent’s clumsy swing, reached nimbly past the man’s guard, and caught his wrist. A deft twist, and the sword went skittering away along the planks, its owner after it to sprawl headlong. Before the second soldier could interfere, the thin-faced dandy had scooped up the weapon and swung to face this new foeman.

  The second soldier saw his doom, but his momentum was too great to stop. Horrified, Tlayesha watched the sword point skid against the lacquered cuirass and slip smoothly up to lodge in the man’s throat. He jacknifed, coughing blood. The noble youth retreated gracefully to the parapet again, like a trained duellist after a match. Somewhere in the darkness a slave snapped his fingers in applause, the way the crowds praised a winning gladiator at the Hirilakte Arenas.

  The first soldier was on his feet, dark blood oozing from an abrasion on his cheek. The remaining two men joined him and circled in from opposite sides, their officer just behind them. The latter bawled a command to surrender.

  Their quarry swung his weapon from side to side, assessing the situation. He was outnumbered. There was only one avenue of escape, perilous though it was. Before anyone could stop him he whirled, took one quick stride up onto the wooden railing, and teetered there undecided for a long moment. He seemed to be looking for help—did he have accomplices amongst the slaves? His servants? No one moved.

  He shouted something then. Tlayesha thought he cried, “—I told you mother-suckling clanless dung-eaters that it would never work—!”

  He turned and jumped outward, into the swamp. A splash and an oily squelching sound came up from below. Then silence.

  Without knowing how she got there, Tlayesha found herself at the parapet, jostled by merchants, slaves, overseers, soldiers, and some of the Shen. People seemed to crowd in from everywhere now that danger was past. A trooper called for torches, and a youth in the shabby livery of the Sakbe road guards (and now cleverly they had stayed out of the fray!) shouted for a rope. A crag-faced older man, a tanner by his leather tunic and the checkerboard design on his headband, snatched a spare tentpole from a cart and pushed it down to probe the dark bog beneath. A little fellow with a huge hooked nose—the tanner’s apprentice, probably—came up beside him and took the pole from his master’s hands.

  There was a form down there, spreadeagled upon the quivering surface of the marsh. The ycung nobleman lay in no more than a finger’s breadth of water. Under any other circumstances he should not even have been stunned by the fall—and ought to have been away, free, into the darkness by now. But all around the bases of the gnarled pilings Tlayesha saw the bloated pods and stunted fronds of the “Food of the Ssu!” The young man struggled, face down, in the midst of the stuff! Even as she watched, his body thrashed weakly, he made gagging sounds, and his fingers tore at the dark-veined tendrils upon his face.

  Then Tlayesha witnessed a thing that capped all of the other horrors of this frightful night. The tanner’s apprentice shoved the tentpole down to touch the nobleman’s bare back. Yet instead of using it to roll the victim out of the deadly foliage, or give him its end to pull himself free, the ugly little man set the tip of the pole against the base of the nobleman’s skull and carefully, deliberately, pushed his head further down into the black-violet, pulpy vegetation! The body twisted spasmodically, and the hands came back to paw futilely at the pole. The young man made a last spluttering sound and lay still.

  “He perished, masters, before I could aid him!” the apprentice cried. The tanner hastened to agree. None of the others were close enough to have seen this act of murder, and Tlayesha’s involuntary protest was lost in the babble of voices. The tanner might have heard, however, for he glanced in her direction.

  A soldier panted up with a rope, and soon the body was hauled feet first from the swamp, dripping wet, yet wealed and puffed all over as though burned by fire.

  The officer in copper armour now approached the captain of the road guards and produced a document. The latter scanned it briefly, shrugged, and handed it on to the commander of the Shen contingent. The first man signalled to his remaining three troopers.

  A billet of wood was found and lashed to the tentpole to serve as a crosspiece. The soldiers stripped the boy of its kilt, methodically inserted the point of the tentpole between the legs, and pushed until nearly three handspans had entered the abdomen. They then lifted the limp form upon this improvised impaling stake and lashed it to the parapet railing.

  Tlayesha turned away, nauseated in spite of herself. She had once seen an impalement—a living victim who shrieked and beat at his belly as the terrible stake pushed up through his entrails— but this senseless degradation of a man already dead was somehow worse. It seemed to deprive him of any last shred of dignity. How would he appear before the Ferryman to Lord Belkhanu’s Isles of the Excellent Dead? To humiliate a noble corpse in this fashion meant a great crime against the Imperium—or against someone of awesome power!

  She stumbled back into the slave boy. Without any conscious volition, her arms went out to embrace him, and his came up to encircle her waist. She had no idea whether she needed to console him, or whether she herself wanted comforting. They stood together for what felt like aeons while people around them chattered and pointed and stared and finally began to drift away.

  The boy’s fingers cradled her cheek. They did not tremble at all. Before she could react he lifted up her face to look directly into her eyes. She wondered, confused and astonished, if he was about to kiss her! But then he pressed her head firmly on around so that she looked into the throng still gathered beneath the limp body upon its stake.

  The boy’s mouth was open, his jaw muscles working with the strain. Then he spoke. In clear, perfect Tsolyani, he said:

  “The tanner—is—a Mihalli. Of—Yan Kor... Soldiers—from Prince Dhich’une—Sarku. They seek me—and Eyil, the girl, the one given Zu’ur.”

  He could say no more. His eyes closed, and two tears squeezed out upon his cheeks. His shoulders began to shake in the spasms of the shaking sickness, and let Tlayesha go to stumble back into the darkness.

  She was left to stand, openmouthed, gazing first after the slave boy and then into the crowd where the tanner and his apprentice had been.

  Now they were gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Nothing more could be learned from the ’nameless slave boy during the night. In the grey drizzle that accompanied the dawn Tlayesha picked through her meagre array of drugs and medicines, but nothing suggested itself. The flawed yellow crystal she had purchased in Jakalla did not capture his soul, as its seller had sworn it. would. She then had hopes of an infusion of pounded Ngaru-bark; sometimes that kept a person on the borderland of sleeping and waking, leaving the mind free to speak what was sealed within the heart. But the slave only went to sleep, exhausted. The rest of her pharmacopoeia—soporifics, anaesthetics, simple stomach remedies, bandages and potions that could clean a wound or slow menstrual bleeding—were of no use at all.

  As soon as they got to Purdimal she could go to the drug-sellers who sat in the Court of Cries below the black pyramid of Lord Ksarul’s temple. Chnesuru’s fellow-countryman, evil-visaged Gdeshmaru, had his apothecary’s shop there. He would know how to restore the boy’s wits if anybody could. Gdeshmaru was unlikely to betray her. She knew of a score of instances in which he had aided Chnesu
ru, and the plump slaver still lived. Moreover, Tlayesha had had dealings of her own with him: was there not the affair of Chnesuru’s slave girl and the governor’s clan-niece, a matter in which Gdeshmaru had provided a handful of bitter little seeds to break the latter’s infatuation? The niece was happily married now into the Clan of the Golden Sunburst, and her new kinfolk would not take kindly to revelations of behaviour more suited to a devotee of Dlamelish—or virginal Dilinala, who loved other women—than to Lord Hnalla.

  Something very wrong had happened last night, a thing far too momentous for Tlayesha. It might be a matter too high even for Gdeshmaru, who handled the peccadilloes of the aristocracy as smoothly as a ship sails downriver. She could of course remain silent, pretend ignorance, and hope to keep the impaler’s stake out of her belly. Perhaps she had already seen too much.

  Fear struck her like a wave. In the name of all of the Indigo Aspects of Lady Aventhe, what was she about?

  She tried to put the events of the night aside, but her mind kept nibbling at them as a Hmelu-calf chews its mother’s udder. She cursed herself for a fool. One of her earliest memories was of her clan-mother laughingly accusing her of being a living incarnation of Shaka’an, the Little Girl Who is Curious, one of Lady Avanthe’s Lesser Aspects. La, what had been meant as a loving gibe might well have been a forecast of her death!

  There was more to it, of course: more than stupid inquisitiveness! What were her feelings for the wretched slave boy? Did she want to lie with him, tie herself to him? No calm, brave, noble provider he! Not the sort of husband about whom a giri weaves her dreams! Nor did she want to be a mother to him, nurse him, and clutch him to her as a clan-wife dandles her babes! Lady Avanthe’s maternal instincts could be allowed to go only so far!

  She threw her jars back into her bag, angry at herself for even thinking such confused thoughts.

  Whatever the boy knew was fraught with danger. He had mentioned the dread name of Prince Dhich’une, and she herself had seen the copper-trimmed armour and the blazon of the Worm upon the soldiers’ breastplates. She shivered. Stories of the secret societies within the temples trickled like underground streamlets along the trade routes of the Empire. Rumour had it that one of these, the Society of the Copper Tomb of the Temple of Lord Sarku, was headed by the Emperor’s youngest son himself. Beyond this the wagging tongues babbled a myriad tales, but who knew what was true and what was no more than the embroidery of imagination?

  To add spice to the sauce, there had also been mention of Yan Kor, though she could not remember the boy’s exact words.

  What was the other thing he had said? That the tanner was a Mihalli? She had heard the legends: once the alien Mihalli had shared Tekumel with mankind and the other nonhuman species. They had lived someplace—she racked her brain to recall—far away to the northeast, beyond the Empire, beyond Saa Allaqi which was the homeland of the Baron Aid, the man who was now overlord of Yan Kor, beyond Jannu and wild Kilalammu, somewhere in the unknown lands where nobody went. The Mihalli were famous as shape-changers. The market storytellers used them in their plots: almost every tale-cycle had a Mihalli villain in it. What they looked like Tlayesha was not sure. The puppeteers in Bey Sii had a beast-like creature with many heads painted in gaudy colours, and in the Story of Garu, which she had once seen acted in Jakalla, the costume had been that of a serpent-like creature with the face of a man. Most of the tales agreed that a Mihalli could always be found out by its eyes, however; these never changed no matter what form it put on: they invariably glowed red and were hollow, with no pupils.

  The slave boy had been certain that there was a Mihalli among the crowd on the parapet. Whatever other symptoms the shaking sickness had, it did not bring on hallucinations. The boy really believed that there was a Mihalli here somewhere. Superstition? An ignorant Livyani peasant-lad, who saw monsters in every tree? He did not impress her as such. Not at all.

  This morning Tlayesha wandered the length of the platform, peering into tents, talking to everyone, and listening to a hundred different accounts of the incident of the previous night. Of the tanner and his apprentice there was no sign. Travellers came and went, of course, and they might have departed before Gayel set. But then why would a tanner wish to journey by night along this dismal, dangerous road?

  Itk t’Sa added to her apprehensions when they met over breakfast by the sick-cart. The Pe Choi looked at Tlayesha and whispered, “What did the slave see?”

  Not “What happened?” or any of the more likely questions she might have asked.

  Tlayesha dared not confide in the creature—not yet. She only shrugged and grunted a noncommital reply. The Pe Choi touched the sleeping slave boy’s face gently with her chitinous fingers and went away.

  Chnesuru soon appeared to give the command to march. He kept a stolid, impassive face and said nothing of the night’s events. The overseers caught their master’s mood and lashed the caravan into almost a trotting pace. They made excellent time. On this morning, however, the skies chose to grieve: slow, warm rain fell, and tatters of cloud clung to Thenu Thendraya’s skirts, sometimes drifting aside to reveal seamed black cliffs like the cheeks of an old woman. Around noon the sun appeared and turned the air into gasping, dripping steam.

  One day went by, and then another. The mornings continued to weep grey rain-tears, while the afternoons were humid and sticky beyond endurance. They marched through a silent landscape upon bridges of wet, black timbers, over waters that were sheets of muddy agate. All around were thickets of impenetrable marsh-reeds: ominous, full of eyes, and creatures, and the promise of secret death. It was enough to make one believe in the legends of the Tsoggu, the drowned corpses who wandered the wastes all covered with slime and burning green lich-fire...

  Tlayesha could stand it no longer. When they camped on the last night before reaching Purdimal she brought the slave boy into the tent and confronted Itk t’Sa directly. She sat the Pe Choi down and made the slave squat before them both. Then she told Itk t’Sa some of what had occurred since he was brought to the caravan outside Bey Sii. She omitted mention of the Zu’ur-victim, and of the terrible things the youth had told her there upon the road platform. Those matters—and certain of her gloomier suspicions—were too dangerous to reveal to anyone as yet. Itk t’Sa heard her out, then said only, “It is as I had seen it.” “You knew something all along? Why—?”

  “I want no involvement in the plottings of men. Some of my race take part in your doings. Others do not.” The Pe Choi hesitated. “Why I am here is intelligible only to one of my people and concerns no one else. My life is one of silence. Were I to speak, it would be otherwise. ‘A stone thrown into a stream cannot help but make a splash.’ ”

  “But—”

  “There is a reason, however, for me to speak now.” Itk t’Sa raised a porcelain-white, many-jointed finger. “You must have heard that we Pe Choi suffer from a sense of empathy: the ability to feel—and endure—the emotions of those we meet. In some cases this amounts almost to telepathy, particularly amongst our females.”

  “You can see minds, then? Like a sorcerer?”

  “Not the same. Not as some humans do, who pierce through the many skins of reality to draw force from the Planes Beyond. What I experience is different. When you first brought the slave into our tent—do you recall it?—you asked him to come inside, and I awakened from sleep to look upon him.”

  “Yes?”

  “For a moment, when he stood before me, I thought to see a Pe Choi, one of my own race.”

  “A Pe Choi? A shape-changer? A Mihalli—!”

  Itk t’Sa shook her long head, a very human gesture. “Not so. It was as though there were two beings there: a young male of my race and this youth of your species. When my eyes focussed the illusion was gone.”

  “You spoke to him in your own tongue.”

  “Yes, I was off guard. It was the Ch’ketk N’tu, the feeling, the empathy—there is no word ... I felt that this slave was one of my own people, even th
ough I knew this could not be so.”

  Tlayesha turned to look at the slave. He sat by the tent-flap, attentive, without trembling. His eyes were fixed upon Itk t’Sa.

  “I cannot enter his mind. Yet I know—I feel—that he is the victim not of a disease but of sorcery.”

  “Sorcery! Oh, if only he could speak! I have tried everything, even simple gestures of yes and no, but each time he tries to communicate in any way he suffers a seizure.”

  “More proof. Not damage to the brain, but a spell that binds him. Yet I think he has improved since he came to us?”

  “Yes, much. When I first saw him he shook almost constantly, and he could neither eat nor hold his bowels. Now he is almost normal—until he is addressed ...”

  The Pe Choi rose and took up the lamp. She held it close to the slave’s eyes and moved it from side to side. Then she spoke again in her own harsh language. The slave’s pupils dilated, wavered. He tried to speak, but Itk t’Sa laid bony fingers upon his lips. “Whatever the spell is, it wears off. Slowly, slowly. In time ... I can help him.”

  Tlayesha took a deep breath, made up her mind, and launched into the rest of the story. This time she omitted nothing.

  No one moved when she had done. The Pe Choi was a graceful statue of buttery-gold lamplight, the boy kneeling before her a mural from some temple wall.

  “There are those in Purdimal who might aid you—him,” Itk t’Sa said carefully. “I cannot read your heart, yet I think that your motives are plain—to me, even if not to you.”

  “My motives? Concern for a patient—fear for this poor boy—” “Cha! What is he to you? Go to the Palace of the Realm in Purdimal, girl, to any officer of the Omnipotent Azure Legion. Let them have this slave and do as they will! Or leave the matter to the soldiers of the Worm Prince—or to the Mihalli, or to the Yan Koryani, or to the Hu-bats! Is you Skein of Destiny so wretched that you would see it so soon tom asunder?’ ’