The Storm Lord

14

In the sunset the mountains were crusts of flame.

After sunset the darkness came slowly, spreading like ink in the crevasses. Once its work was done, the great spires were entirely featureless, except for the distant red dots of hunters’ fires or the occasional eyes of what was hunted.

Each time, as the light went out of the mountains, some reflected meaning stirred faintly in her mind. But she was mainly dead. Once it occurred to her: “I am a slave.” But this meant, on the whole, very little.

Astaris never wondered if Amrek had planned this fate for her in lieu of the stake. In point of fact, the merchant had taken matters into his own hands.

There had been a cloaked stranger in the market in the dim hour before dawn.

“Are you Bandar the merchant?”

“What if I am?”

“This, if you are,” and the amazing bag of gold was put in his grasp.

“For what am I given this?”

“You’re taking your caravan over the pass to Thaddra, now the trouble’s settled? Well, there’s to be a passenger for you. A court lady. One of the Princess Astaris’s women. A Karmian.”

“For what do I want a passenger to eat my food?”

The cloaked man had shifted a little, and somehow the edge of his cloak slid aside and revealed the silver lightning which was Amrek’s personal blazon. After that, Bandar ceased arguing.

It was a dangerous task, running through the lower ways of the palace, first alone, next with the—court lady. Oh, indeed. He knew well enough who she was once he had seen her hair. At first he had been terrified, his bowels scalded with terror. But once he had her safe away, other emotions came to him. He had heard, by then, the tale of her adultery, for Koramvin gossips had briefly joined his caravan on the road. Bandar and his woman dyed the princess’s hair black in the secrecy of their wagon. The old fool was probably too stupid to guess what was up, but to be sure, he swore her to silence on the name of one of the ten thousand gods she believed in. Bandar knew now exactly what he had in his possession, and it was more than a bag of gold. She was adrift, without a prayer, this Astaris. Whoever had got her safe away—could it truly have been Amrek?—had no claims on her now, and she, she seemed living in a listless dream. Perhaps the shock had unhinged her. At any rate, her looks would fetch a good price in the markets of Thaddra. For want of inspiration, he had renamed her Silukis, after his Iscaian mother, and considered the bitch honored. In any event she answered to it obediently, as if her own name meant nothing to her.

The trek over the pass took a month. No robbers attacked or came to gather tax. The Storm Lord’s men had incidentally cleaned out most of their nests for the present. All told, it was a propitious journey.

The morning the wagons moved down into Thaddra, the mountains were hot and hard and blue.

It was a dark land—humid black jungle forest and still heat without much brightness from the sun. Rarnammon had built a city here once, but it lay in ruins. Now each area had its own guardian, or little king, all giving lip service to Dorthar and to Zakoris, and all bickering between themselves. It was a land to be lost in, and not found. A dark land indeed.

They came to a place called Tumesh, where there was a large and ugly town of squat swarthy buildings which resembled perfectly its inhabitants. Tumesh, as Thaddra went, was wealthy. She had, therefore, the money for Bandar’s goods—mostly ornaments and women—for metal ore, gems and prettiness were rare in Thaddra.

They settled in the great marketplace, and the old fat woman came puffing into the wagon. She stripped Astaris, and adorned her in a dress of mauve gauze and copper bangles, with paper orchids for her black hair. Astaris put up her hand and touched her hair, and smiled faintly. She was thinking of Raldnor and the dye that had preserved his secret, like hers. The woman, judging her quite insane, clucked at her and prodded her out on to the square.

There was a rostrum with a bell-hung awning. Under it Astaris was set to stand along with other girls who wept or smirked. Her surroundings affected her no more than a passing mist, for she was thinking only of him. It was her grief and her sustenance. She had no being except in what had gone before.

“You be careful, Bandar,” the fat woman muttered to him. “Don’t haggle too long over that one. She may have looks, but she’s daft and they’ll see it. And she’s got a brat coming.”

That last piqued Bandar’s curiosity. Was it Amrek’s child or the Sarite’s bastard? Well, no matter. It didn’t show in the gaudy dress, and she would probably lose it anyhow; she looked too fragile to bear, and she ate like a mouse, praise be.

The bidding began about noon.

A pair of Yllumite girls went first, sniveling, and a piece from Marsak next. Bandar began to be troubled. He led his prize forward and called out at the crowd. Had they no eyes for beauty—such a face, such limbs and breasts . . . and so meek. Had they ever seen so pliable and genteel a woman? She was built for pleasure.

It displeased him intensely that they still hung back. It never occurred to him that she might be too beautiful, too exquisite to appeal.

At last a big rough man came pushing through the crowd. He was tall for a Thaddrian, and heavily constructed, but under his matted hair showed a gold collar, and he wore a mantle of good cloth.

“You, sir. I see you understand the refinements—”

“Stop your squawking, merchant. I’ll take her. Here’s three bars.”

“That won’t do, my lord. This girl’s worth much more. Look at this straight spine. Think of the boys you can get on her—”

“Three bars are my last offer. You’ll be offered no better.”

No one bid against him. Bandar began to have suspicions that the lout was bandit stock, secreted in Tumesh, on the proceeds of his garnered wealth, since Amrek’s forays in the mountains. At last, with ungraceful resignation, he sold his wares and took the measly payment.

“What’s her name?”

“Silukis,” snapped Bandar.

“Seluchis,” said the man, corrupting the name at once with his Thaddrian-Zakorian slur.

Bandar, even his mother affronted now, thrust the girl into the brute’s keeping and wished them both ill of each other as he pocketed the silver bars.

His name was Slath, and he had made his money in robbery, as Bandar supposed, and also in hiring himself out as a cutthroat to the various lords of Thaddra. He bought the girl because she represented a form of elusive culture. He had seen it sometimes in old wall paintings in the ruined city of Rarnammon, where occasionally he holed up when things were uncomfortable for him. He was a romantic villain, and impulsive, and he knew he had made a mistake with her as soon as he got her into his house.

He gave her some wine and meat nevertheless, which she scarcely touched, and afterward he took her to his bedroom. She was as dull in that as in everything. Slath liked a woman with some spirit—a grunting bandit mare or a clever whore who pretended.

“A pleasure slave are you, by Zarduk! You’ll have to try harder than that.”

He reduced her position. She swept out hearths and carried water. After three days he whipped her for her negligence. She was simple and he had been cheated. She did not even wail and weep at his blows. He contemplated the blood trickling down her satin back. She was useless, fit only to be looked at. He held off the lash then and considered another possibility—perhaps some Thaddrian lord would buy her. She would look good beside a supper table in some little kingdom—a king’s ornament. Slath hung up his whip and sent one of his aides running for a salve.

There was a lord in the jungle forest, many miles northward. Slath had been meaning to hire out to him, if he wanted men. Slath disliked being long idle and, besides, had a certain reputation among his kind which would stand him in good stead. The lord was a great one for conquest, he had heard, a man of vague beginnings, like all lords in Thaddra it seemed, who had built his power from a store of treasure and gold, displaced the petty king and thereafter annexed five other kingdoms. Such a one offered good pickings. His shadow had been growing for years.

Slath did not travel light but with servants, to show his essential rank. After four days’ riding they reached one of the nameless rivers of Thaddra and poled upstream into the thick wet gloom of the forest.

At this time Slath kept his girl Seluchis on his own craft, under a shady awning, and tried to see to it that she was well fed. She sat like a statue, never moving, and seldom ate. He had not laid a finger on her since that first time. He pampered the bitch; nevertheless, he expected she would lose her looks, damn her. Somehow she did not. She seemed unaware of the languid heat, and once he observed a butterfly settle undisturbed on her wrist for nearly an hour. On the whole she made him uneasy, and he would be glad to be rid of her.

They were five days on the river. On the sixth there was a challenge. Slath, who had once bought a certain password in the ruined city, with a knife, was conducted from the creeper-grown jetty to a hacked-out jungle road.

By evening they had reached the walls of a large Thaddrian town with, clustered about them, an overspill of rough hide tents and wooden huts. Cook fires spangled the dusk, and in the untidy streets dogs ran and women stared. At the far end of the town rose the Guardian’s palace, a three-towered mansion of stone.

Astaris raised her head to look at it. It seemed to have some meaning for her, though what, she could not understand as it reared out of the twilight of her brain. For some time past there had been a curious glimmering, a disturbance in her mind, as if he were there, alive once again. But this could not be. She had felt his passing from her, and comprehended it. Raldnor. She suffered the false expression of his life in her, therefore, as if suffering the pain of a long-healed wound, something which stirred without reason, and for which nothing could be done.

In the wild garden at the palace’s foot ruby blossoms drooped and ruby birds slept. One of the blossoms opened its petals and flew away into the forest.

It was an old palace, rough built but strong. There were massive but unornamented pillars in the great hall, and a smoke hole in the roof to serve the fire pit, there being no hearth.

Slath was well received, given a couple of no-more-than-average drafty cells for himself and his servants and promised an audience after dinner with the lord Hmar. Slath used the hour before dinner well, strolling about among the gaudy hangings and the snarling dogs, casually questioning here and there. When the meal was served, he found himself at one of the lower tables, and the food was plain but good. No one began their meat, however, until the lord was seated at his upper place.

Slath observed him closely and with a practical cunning. Hmar was a thin, oddly elegant man in his middle years. He ate with a niceness not common to the lords of Thaddra and seemed to expect those at his high table to do likewise; for the first time in a decade, Slath took care with his food. The face of Hmar was strange. It was like brown polished bone, of light complexion for a Thaddrian, and it gave nothing away—except, that was, for the eyes. They were narrow and flickering. They seemed in an eternal motion of search as if he quested for someone in the hall, some visitor he expected might be there at any moment. Slath recognized them as the eyes of a man in fear or very great unease.

And there had been talk. Slath had heard that Hmar had claimed, once or twice, to be the son of a goddess.

On the whole, Slath was pleased with the two aspects of Lord Hmar. If he was afraid, a little unbalanced, he would appreciate a strong and ruthless man to protect him, and, if he was so elegant, he would appreciate also the man’s slave.

He noticed then the woman standing at Hmar’s shoulder.

A swarthy Thaddrian, short and wide-hipped, with wiry black hair constrained in two plaits that fell below her waist. No woman in Thaddra or Zakoris would sit by her lord at table except the King’s High Queen at Hanassor. To stand at his side showed rank enough.

“Who’s the girl at the lord’s elbow?” he inquired of a neighbor.

“Not for your plate. Panyuma’s her name, the lord’s slut for five years.”

Slath took her in properly then. She was the sort of girl he liked himself, despite her sullen, haughty eyes. But there were bits of gold winking on her sandals and in her plaits, and she filled the lord’s cup with a proprietory air.

“A tasty lass,” Slath remarked carefully, knowing what he said might be repeated to her if she were powerful here, and that he could afford to be insolent but not derogatory. “But doesn’t Lord Hmar have more than one? It’s usual.”

“Oh, there are others. Ten or more, I’ve heard. Even some of those tall narrow females from the south. But he keeps them well hidden. Panyuma’s the only woman seen about him.”

Later, when Slath was summoned to the lord’s presence, he went with a cheerful mind. The interview was brief and to the point. Slath had done well and foresaw doing better. In the campaigns to come there would be swift promotion, and Hmar seemed indeed to be all he had judged him. Slath restrained his after-dinner belches in deference to the graceful manners, and grinned inwardly at those nervous flickering eyes. At the last he spoke of his trouble, the genteel-born girl he feared was going to be a nuisance to him in his quarters here.

“Of course, Lord Hmar, I’d throw her out without a second thought, if it weren’t for her remarkable looks. I saw her by sheer luck at a private sale—” He went on to say how he had been certain she was some noble’s sister reduced through a decline in family fortunes, and how he had paid fifty bars for her.

Hmar looked at him, and the restless eyes leveled for a moment.

“I’ve been told of your girl already. If you wish to sell her to me you may bring her, and I’ll consider the proposition.”

Jolted by this bluntness, Slath shouted at the door for his servants, and Seluchis was hurried in. She had been bathed and dressed in a robe of thin red silk; the pungent scent of cibba wood emanated from her flesh.

Her eyes lifted and came to rest on Lord Hmar.

Slath was startled. It was the first time he had seen any life in her eyes at all. For an instant a look seemed to pass between Hmar and the girl—the robber sensed a bizarre recognition on both their faces.

“Yes,” Hmar said shortly, but there was a curious tremor in his voice, “you may ask my man outside for fifty bars’ payment.”

Unnerved already, Slath had anticipated argument over the price; shocked again, he bowed himself feverishly out and left his slave to her new master.

It was as if, drifting for miles over a faceless ocean she had come suddenly in sight of a marker in the sea. Nothing good in it, nothing to bring her joy or peace, for these could never be hers again, yet something oddly recognized. She did not comprehend how she knew him. She did not know him as a man. She knew him as all things know their own death, and with as much despair.

He said tightly: “She is here. I sense Her here. How can She be here, because of you, you Vis woman?”

By this she understood that he too sensed his death, and she was his death. They were to be each other’s.

“So be it,” she said to him.

He started violently, then seemed to master himself—all but the darting eyes, which, instead of raking the room, now explored her intensely.

“You inspire me with fear. This should be amusing. You’re nothing. A slave. Offal. Whatever you once were has been obliterated. This is how it devolves upon us all. Once I was other than I am. Now I am Hmar, goddess-born, Guardian King of six ant heaps of Thaddra. Panyuma!” he cried out suddenly, and almost at once a curtain parted and a small dark woman slunk through on glittering feet. She looked directly at Astaris, but her broad-boned face was empty. “Panyuma,” Hmar said softly, “take her and prepare her.”

“Yes, lord,” Panyuma said. Her aspect was of a malignant nurse humoring an evil child. But Astaris felt no protest at what was to come. The Thaddrian woman took her arm and conducted her out, and up long flights of ancient stairs.

The last metallic stains of sunset were fading from the sky.

The woman dressed her in a black robe heavy with gold, and wound jewels in her hair. Gold was put around her throat and on her arms and fingers and ears. Astaris grew aware of a curious coldness piercing her where the gold touched her skin.

In the orpiment twilight Panyuma led her through deserted corridors and finally to a granite wall. There was a mechanism in the floor which the Thaddrian clearly knew well. Bare stone parted and revealed a dim-lit gallery beyond. With a swift thrust Panyuma pushed her through, and the walls grated shut between them.

It was a place of the dead.

Here, past Guardians had been buried in the immemorial manner of Vis kings. Vast carved boxes contained their bones, with silver cups and bronze swords heaped up on them, and all about them their warriors frozen forever on their feet, shrunk to black sticks in their armor, with glass gems winking in their eyes. The air was heavy with dust and with the smell of those old embalmings.

But at one end of the gallery was something different. A lamp burned on a stand, and Hmar was sitting on a couch to face her. Behind him ranked ten women with gold burning on their hands and throats, and violet jewels in their hair. Astaris understood three things at once. The women lived, but they did not move, would never move and she was to become one of them.

“I see you comprehend,” Hmar said to her. He rose and came forward and there was a gold cup in his hand. “You’re to be a gift to my mother. I put her gold and her jewels on you, and then I make you as still. She hunts me in the dark. I angered her. But she loves me too, my mother Anack. Fear and love. Here, take the cup. Drink it down. A poison of the jungle, but without pain. A living death. And it will make you immortal. And you’ve no choice, I assure you, madam.”

When she smiled at him and reached out immediately for the cup, he paled. She had reminded him again of another woman, years before, whose name had been Ashne’e.

Astaris emptied the cup. Still smiling, she asked him: “How long must I wait?”

“Not long,” he said.

And it was true. Already she felt the cool passage of the liquor through her body, and presently she ceased to blink.

“Now I shall be what I have always truly been,” she thought.

After a time he picked up her inert body and laid it on the couch; it was still malleable enough for his purpose. She observed his frenzied ecstasy remotely. It was a preliminary and she felt nothing of it. When he was finished, he set her up beside the couch like a doll, arranging her hands as he had arranged the hands of those others. He seemed to be speaking, but she could no longer hear him, and soon her sight also began to fade from her wide open eyes.

She was drowsy, near to the black sleep he had given her. She thought: “Now I am the icon I was always. This is fitting; only the shell and nothing left within.” Then came the stirring in her womb, troubled, seeking. “Be still,” she thought. “You were his and mine, but we are nothing now. Be still.”

The dark came suddenly after that and took her away with it.

In the night, as so often, Anack came for him. He heard the dry rustling of her scales like dead leaves blown about the floor. The white moon of her face crested the foot of the bed. On her head the serpents hissed, and he saw her snake teeth gleam like fire.

He screamed for Panyuma, and woke.

The woman held him in her swarthy arms, but at first he did not recognize the corruption of his name when she spoke it.

“I am Amnorh, High Warden of Koramvis,” he thought, bewildered, as she muttered her dark forest magic to keep spirits at bay. But then he remembered who he was, and how the incantation could keep him safe. For he had come to believe in these things, being no longer independent of their terror.

15

All night long he heard the oars crooning in the water. They had for him the sound of death.

The boat was a narrow, shallow sea-skimmer carrying oil and iron into Zakoris. Raldnor slept, as did all the occasional passengers, under awning on her deck.

The crossing from Dorthar to the Zakorian port of Loth took a day and a night, and the day had been full of his own hope, his own sense of searching, because he had known at that time that she lived, and he had heard of the wild stories in Koramvis. Astaris had not used poison. Powerful friends had got her away, and where else should she fly but to the secret wilderness of Thaddra, which so often had swallowed up men and their histories. And Raldnor himself had a need of secrecy and hiding.

Kren had financed his passage through obscure routes of Dorthar in the dying glare of eastern summer, and from Dorthar to comparative safety in the west. From Zakoris he would travel over the mountain chain into Thaddra. To Kren his debts were numberless; he would repay them when, and if, he ever could. But he had been made to understand that neither repayment nor guilt were expected of him.

As to what he had lost—a mythical throne, a power he had never dreamed before was his—after the first turmoil, it had seemed unimportant beside that need, that tearing rending need, to find Astaris.

The sun sank, twilight clouded the sea. An hour after twilight he felt the almost imperceptible presence stir and slip softly out of his brain. No violence this time, as with the white-haired girl; this was a quiet, serene death—the black sleep came gently on her, for all it was final. But she left him empty.

And this was what he felt in himself—not anguish or pain or a compulsion to weep. Only emptiness. It seemed that in leaving him, she had taken also his soul.

Dawn came, and Loth. He left the ship, but no longer with a purpose.

Beyond the harbor was a broad stinking fish market, and threads of cobbled streets slippery with oil; at their back were clamorous jungle and the black treacle of the swamp.

Raldnor sat through the morning in a steamy hovel where wine and meat were sold. Runny-nosed children banged about the place, and two Zakorian soldiers glared silently at their own thoughts.

At noon he joined a caravan of Ottish merchants. They were traveling to Hanassor, the capital, and they made a great noise which somehow dulled the emptiness in him. He was afraid to let them go, to remain in the humid silence of the town, immobile, with his loss.

On the uncertain jungle road they chattered and sent up clouds of birds screaming in alarm.

After three days they took to the bridges and causeways that crossed the swamp. A foul black stench hung in the air, and the colors of the jungle were distorted before his eyes.

The swamp fever fastened on him with a steady and inexorable grip. By the time they had reached Yla he felt so ill, he thought he would die.

He lay in the dark hot inn, and a physician was sent to him—either by one of the Ottites or a Ylian, fearing plague. He was a smelly old skeleton in an animal skin, probably some journeying holy man, but with sharp, bright eyes and teeth. He stared at Raldnor and said: “You were ill not long since. I tell you, the god of death sits on your shoulder and you must shake him off.”

“He’s welcome to me,” Raldnor said, but he drank the poisonous medicine. He thought in any case that he would die in the night, and was glad of it.

He dreamed of the cave temple above Koramvis, but the statue there was no longer of Anackire but of Astaris, a creature of enamels and rubies, with cold, unquickened eyes.

In the morning the fever had left him.

The Ottish caravan had left also, unable to wait on his recovery. So he was trapped at last in his limbo with despair.

He walked about the ramshackle town, stopping at leprous taverns with walls the color of yellow vomit, asking for news of traders going in any direction. Everything he did was the act of a sleepwalker, his relentless searching quite meaningless.

At noon, exhausted, he sat like an old man on a stone bench in the square and watched the Ylians. Soon the square emptied, leaving only the great slices of white heat and black shadow and the monotonous screech of birds from the surrounding jungle. And then came a lone figure on foot, walking in slow easy strides and whistling.

Raldnor observed him—a brass-burned man with shoulder-blade-long black strings of hair—with no interest as he came nearer. A few yards off he came to a sudden halt.

“By all the gods and goddesses—”

Raldnor glanced in his face.

“Raldnor,” the man grinned, showing his salt-white teeth. “Raldnor of Sar.”

“I beg your pardon,” Raldnor said stiffly, “you seem to know me, but I—”

“Yannul the Lan. We served together, you and I, under the yellow fox, Kathaos Am Alisaar. There, you know me now. And I can see that you must be the sick traveler who came with the Ottish caravan. You’ve a look as though the goddesses took you out of the oven before you were properly baked. And some trouble too. Do you still serve Amrek?”

Raldnor shut his eyes and gave the briefest of smiles.

“I should imagine not.”

“Well, we get little enough news of Dorthar in this place. . . . And you look as if you make room for a mug of black beer. Come with me. I know a halfway decent inn—”

Raldnor opened his eyes and looked hard at him.

“Why should you want to share my company, Yannul of Lan? Ryhgon broke your hand at Abissa because of me.”

“As you see,” Yannul said, “he didn’t make a good job of it. I healed. And besides, you paid him back for me in full, I heard. The taverns of Abissa were noisy with it.”

“You heard from the taverns, too, that I became Amrek’s man?”

“So I did. It was a good joke, though I doubt if Kathaos laughed.”

“And now,” Raldnor said, “having exercised my good fortune too far, I’ve fallen from favor utterly. Because of me, a woman has died. The second woman to die because she loved me. And I, Yannul, am an exiled man, without home or hearth. If I were recognized, I should be killed immediately, without trial or any kind of nicety. You should be more careful who you drink with, my friend.”

“In Lan, Raldnor, we judge a man as we find him, not by what he tells us he’s done. I’ll be glad enough to drink with you, but if you find me wanting since last we met, then say so, and I’ll leave you in peace, you Sarish fool.”

On the flat roof of the inn, under the black awning, it was cooler and almost deserted.

They drank at first in silence, but near the end of the first jug, Yannul told Raldnor what had become of him in Lin Abissa. Wandering about the midnight city streets, sick and delirious, he had finally propped himself against the courtyard door of a house in the merchants’ quarter. Here two girls discovered him—the householder’s wives on their way home from a supper party, as it turned out—and they expressed at once a wish to keep him. He was nursed back to health by a skillful physician, who later informed him that, as a bonus, his master Kathaos had also had him poisoned.

“My iron constitution had luckily expelled the muck along half the gutters of Abissa,” Yannul remarked, “and the old man’s drafts ensured my survival. Don’t let it trouble you. You see I live and breathe.”

As for his hand, the physician had set it faultlessly—at the absent merchant’s expense. The two ladies, it seemed, thought a lot of him, and he soon found himself repaying them by service in their beds. Hearing, however, of his unwitting benefactor’s imminent return, Yannul prudently took his leave.

He secured work on a ship bound for Zakoris, and thereafter labored at various occupations until he took up with an acrobatic troupe. They were of little ability and a quarrelsome disposition, and, having spent a few days with them on the road, he decided to desert in the first town, which turned out to be Yla. Here he toiled at the ledgers of a timber merchant, accruing enough coin to buy a passage to Alisaar. Zakoris was too stern a land for Yannul, though he had no plans as yet to return to his own. But in Alisaar jugglers and body dancers were liked well enough. Besides, he had once known a beautiful Alisaarian contortionist. . . .

Raldnor found himself stirred to anger and icy dismay by the first part of the narrative. Further on, he laughed here and there. It surprised him. He had imagined himself in all ways emotionally, if not physically, dead. In turn Yannul did not press for information, and Raldnor told him nothing. His grief, and the burden of his grief were terrible; to relate them would be a superfluous, useless agony. Yet he found he needed Yannul; after all, the anchor of human company dulled his pain.

In the afternoon, Yannul settled his affairs at Yla. The following morning they were on the road to Hanassor and the sea, riding with two or three vendors and a cage of snarling black swamp beasts.

At a hostel on the road, they heard some news from Dorthar.

Amrek had seemed dead with his faithless bride; now he had left whatever emotional grave had held him. He returned with vigor and determination and set about that burning plan of his adult life—to sweep Vis clean of the sorcerous and defiled race of the Lowlanders. Already the edict had gone out: death to any Plains people inside the limits of Dorthar. His dragons were hard put to it to find them. They had scoured the minor towns and villages for their prey. Only a few remained, and these were the old, the sick and the unthinking. Execution had been haphazard, though total. A casual, ultimately competent butchering.

The twist to the story—what interested the Zakorians in the hostel much more than the Lowland slaughter—was the reaction to it by the King of Xarabiss, old Thann Rashek, sometimes called the Fox. Surely a fox should be more sly?

He had sent word to Amrek that he deplored the act. “Is it your ambition, Amrek, son of Rehdon, to make known your name by a shedding of blood? To begin with the death of my daughter’s daughter, Astaris Am Karmiss, whom you slew without trial or certainty; continuing with the massacre of virgins and babies?”

There had been an answer, too. The storm gods of Dorthar directed Amrek in his holy war—they would no longer brook the scum of the snake goddess. The earthquake which shook Koramvis had been their warning. Indeed, Amrek understood quite well that Xarabiss indulged herself in trade with the Lowlands, which enterprise must instantly cease. As to Rashek’s charge that he slew virgins, the Xarabians could set their minds at rest. There would not have been a single dead girl who could legitimately have claimed that title after capture by the dragon soldiery.

There was some laughter in the hostel over Amrek’s wit, though, on the whole the Zakorians thought him a shallow King, chasing after his phantoms like a peevish child.

To Raldnor, hunched by the murky fire in the cool of the jungle night, the discussion and the mirth came like a far-off baying, a cry of despair carried on the wind out of his past. A new pain pierced the old. He felt the wondrous agony come on him. “My people,” he thought. “My people.” The images crowded close as the chill night: Eraz, his mother, the men and women of his youth, the dragon, too, spitting in the snow, and the soldier who had hunted him through Lin Abissa; last, Anici, white as winter, a pale bone of death. And he had walked at Amrek’s side—Amrek, his brother, the murderer and the madman. And then came the final turn of the knife in him. He had taken that man’s woman. If he had never done so, would Amrek, in the shade of her serenity, have forgotten to wreak his vengeance on the Plains? It came too late, the guilt and the knowledge and the shame.

He saw Yannul looking at him in the red shadows.

“Black news for the Lowlanders,” Yannul said. “Perhaps their snake lady will strike Amrek down.”

“Like her people,” Raldnor said, “she has her teeth, but never uses them. And a thing grows rusty with disuse.”

And remembering how he had lost his naivety and his faith in Abissa when he read of Dorthar’s gods, he half smiled and thought: “And now I have lost everything.”

Hanassor. The Black Beehive of Zakoris, whose bees were known not for their honey, but their sting.

Built into the conical cliffs, the sea breaking on its lower walls red as wine in the sunset, not a light showing, everything encased, a city like a brain in a black granite skull.

Igur, the old king, was dead, and the brief period of mourning done. Igur’s eldest sons had fought for the throne, as was customary, for Zakoris had not forgotten her heritage of war. Yl had won the contest by breaking his brothers’ backs. He took three hundred wives to his throne with him, and crowned his first queen for slitting the throat, while heavy with his child, of a swamp leopard.

All this they learned at the gate.

It was always night in Hanassor under the rock, always torchlight and shadow.

They ate in a stony inn, where a fire-dancer scorched her gauzy clothes off her body with two spitting brands. There was a blue scar on her thigh. She had been careless once.

They made enquiries of the landlord, who spoke of a ship making for Saardos and offered to direct her captain to their table. Later, a black-burned man with a gold stud winking in his left nostril came and sat by them.

“I’m Drokler, ship lord of Rom’s Daughter. I hear you want to buy a passage to Saardos. I don’t take passengers, as a rule, you understand, excepting slaves.”

They bargained half an hour with him over the cost of their fare. In the end it was settled and a clerk called in to draw up their agreement, this being Zakoris and life and liberty on the whole rather cheap. Drokler could write only his name, but this he did with brutal flourish. They pocketed their deeds, paid off the clerk and sought their beds.

At first light a sailor came to guide them to the cellars of the city, and the great caverns where the ships of Hanassor lay at anchor. The man rowed them through the arching caves, among the frozen, albescent dripping of stalactites, and the dusky flickering forests of spars, into the morning and the wide mouth of the ocean.

Rorn’s Daughter was out, showing herself a tower ship of the western seas, triple oar banks spooning already at the glassy water, her sail bellying on the early wind, bright with the double moon and dragon device of Zakoris.

“She’s a fine thing,” Yannul said.

The sailor only grunted; he was an unenamored man, well used to his wife.

He got them aboard and showed them to their boxlike accommodation in the guts of the tower. They would be eating above in Drokler’s hall, he said, and gave them a sourly congratulatory look before going off about his duties.

Minutes later there came the judder and swerve beneath their feet that told of departure. The oar banks churned, and she sprang out from the bay, a great wooden she-animal, staring with the scarlet eyes painted on her prow.

It was a pull of fourteen days to Saardos, a leisurely, uneventful voyage, marked by the groaning of timbers and the crack of the sail, the screams of sea birds and the occasional brawls of the sailors, under a sky as clear as painted enamel.

Women worked with the crew, the ship’s prostitutes, for trade did not stop for Zastis. They were a tough, wild lot, willing and able to fight like swamp cats. Their hair was the same bleached-out gray-black as the sailors’ from the scouring of the acid salt winds.

By day Yannul and Raldnor indulged in those immemorial pastimes of the passenger—the book, the dice or the flagon—or walked about the deck. At dusk they ate at Drokler’s table in the tower, along with Jurl the oars master, monosyllabic and mannerless, and Elon, officer of the deck, a quiet unremarkable man, who studied at table a succession of dark-bound, apparently entirely similar manuscripts.

In the night a woman might come stealing to their box. Yannul accepted what was offered him, and with any whose lovemaking proved inartistic, took it on himself to teach them Lannic methods. So Raldnor lay alone through the groaning, spume-sounding nights, listening to these activities of lust. He did not want their women and could not sleep. He took to prowling about the ship in the moonlight. In the moon’s path the water was like milk. He thought of the ruined city on the Plains, the white wolf and the white girl. He felt a kind of drawing exerted on him.

“Where is home? Is this then my home, after all I’ve done to escape it? The Lowlands and the shadow of Amrek’s threat. Why not? I am hated like my land, and believed dead and toothless like my land. Ashne’e, my mother, puts her ghost hand on my brain and turns it to the south. Perhaps, then, not Saardos but the Plains. Perhaps I will go home.”

A day out from the bay of Saardos, Drokler honored the brass Rom god in the prow with a pound of incense.

The blank god mask stared back at them through the pall of sweet blue smoke. It was an ugly rough-hewn thing, without the passion or the delicacy of a Xarabian Yasmis, and with none of the cruel magnificence of the dragon-headed icons of Dorthar. It gazed in myopic stillness out over the long shock of the waves, ignoring their words, their presence, their costly offering.

A blazing magenta sun sank, apparently steaming, in the sea. Black towers of cumulus clouds were rising in the south, and the heavy pulse of the wind pressed like a hand on the trembling hollowed sail.

The narrow craggy strip of coast which was Alisaar receded into darkness.

At dinner, Jurl was absent from the board.

“Poor weather to make harbor in,” Yannul remarked.

The wind kicked at the ship, and plates slid in their scoops. On their iron chains the low-slung candle wheels clanged dismally, and hot wax dripped.

“Rorn has a bellyache,” Drokler said.

Caught in the high window of the tower, the sky blushed black. The ship, as if sensing the maturing of unseen forces beneath her, leapt like an animal in fear.

“Can you make Saardos in this?”

“Oh, indeed, Lannic gentleman. We run before the wind and use our oars. This place is free of rocks. No need to be alarmed. Eat your meal, or have you lost your appetite?”

Elon rose and put aside his book. He went without a word, and when the door to the deck was opened, the room seemed filled by the plunge of the purple gulf all around them and by sudden lightning.

Drokler got to his feet.

“Continue with your food, gentlemen.”

Simultaneously, Rom’s Daughter tilted on her side in a horrifying yet almost frivolous movement. There came from every quarter of the ship the sound of unsecured things rattling and cascading. One of the great candle wheels, flung sideways with enormous force, struck Drokler on the temple with a sick, dull clash. The ship lord collapsed across the board without a sound. The two junior officers, who had risen with him, gave vent to cursing. One ran for the surgeon and left the door flapping on the crow blackness outside.

Yannul and the remaining officer eased Drokler on to the floor. He was breathing thickly, but otherwise looked quite dead. The officer made a clumsy religious sign to one of the many rough and uncaring sea elementals of the Zakorians.

Yannul got up.

“Look for me later,” he muttered as he passed Raldnor, “I’m about to give our dinner to the sea.”

The water-rushing, intangible darkness of the deck enveloped him. Raldnor moved out into it and passed the surgeon in the doorway, a man with swimming eyes and a look of terror ill-concealed on his face. It was not good to lose a captain while at sea, for the Zakorians carried their own factions and wars with them on their ships. Lightning speared the deck. Raldnor saw the livid shapes scurrying about the sail, and the yellow spindrift cast up from the oars below.

The oars.

Jurl still had them row, then, even against this. And yet, what hope could there be now, other than to ride the tempest out? Besides which, the hatches would be taking in the sea with every lurch of the waves, and there would soon be broken ribs or worse among the rowers, administered by bucking oar poles.

Raldnor swung aside and through the narrow, low aperture leading to the below-decks rowers’ station.

The dismal, gloomy, stinking dark of the place was accentuated by the odor of fear and the flickering lanterns smoking from the damp. There came the hiss of the ocean—already the lower positions were awash—and the creak of the iron-bladed oars and of men’s cracking sinews. Jurl sat on the master’s platform, spume spurling at his feet, relentlessly drumming the oars’ beat, his face an ugly, carven, immovable mask. He had a look of Ryhgon. Certainly he was of Ryhgon’s breed. Raldnor took a breath of hate from the fetid air and shouted: “Lay in, oar’s master! She’s drinking the sea.”

Without turning or faltering in his beat, Jurl spat through his teeth: “Empty your damned guts somewhere else, Dortharian. We run to Saardos.”

Raldnor sensed men straining to hear him even as they strained at the oars.

“Lay in, Jurl, and close the hatches before you sink this ship or kill half your oarsmen.”

“I’ll take no orders from you, you mewling bitch-birth. Get out before I break your back.”

Rorn’s Daughter seemed suddenly to spin beneath them. There came a cacophony of impossible thunder, and gouts of white water burst through the hatches, splintering them like broken glass. Men, up to their necks in the water, screamed and dropped their oars, which veered and struck others from behind. The compelling rhythm fell apart.

Raldnor leaped to Jurl and hit him in the ribs, then seizing the beater’s hammer, struck him between neck and shoulder with a blow suited to his bulk. Across the confused cries and shouting, Raldnor roared for them to draw in the oars and secure the hatches. Presently he went down into the chaos and pulled with them. These rowers were paid men—only war fleets or pirates used slaves—and therefore had none of the hypnotized discipline of helpless chattels. He sensed them on the verge of panic-stricken mutiny and formed them into a baling chain before it took them. A man’s voice called from the back.

“The wind’ll blow us beyond Saardos into the sea of hell—we’ll fall into Aarl!”

“Stories for women and children,” Raldnor shouted back. “Do we have someone’s wench down here, passing for a man?”

There was some crude laughter and no further complaints after that. He had learned what Zakorians feared the most, and it was not death.

When they had cleared the galley levels of water, he left them to Elon’s orders, and took Jurl over his back to the oars master’s quarters near the stern.

The fury of the storm seemed to be lessening. Rifts had appeared in the cloud mass, though the sea tossed them up and down like a ball. It had gulped men and supplies from the deck and left them, in barter, a host of flopping sea creatures.

He found Yannul with a paper face in the tower.

“Perhaps my sacrifice did us good,” he muttered. “Oh, to be in Lan, where the hills are blue and, above all, motionless.”

Overhead the sea had shattered the window, and glass and broken plates floated on the inch or so of water on the tower’s floor.

Elon came in from the deck and said: “Is the surgeon still here? I’ve some men with smashed bones.”

The surgeon came quickly and went out. Drokler had no further need of him, being dead.

The sea lay down and seemed to smoke. The smoke formed a gray twilight that crept coiling on the deck. They baled and slung off the water, and cooked the dead fish on damp fires to replace the provisions the sea had taken.

“Sir, it was good of you to help us,” Elon said to Raldnor. “With Drokler dead, it will be a serious business getting her to Saardos.”

“Jurl will cause you trouble, then?”

“Oh, indeed, yes. And he doesn’t like to fall asleep across his oars. I warn you to be on your guard, sir, while you continue to ride Rorn’s Daughter.”

“My thanks for the warning. But we’re only a day out, aren’t we?”

“No longer,” Elon said. “The storm blew us off our course, and how widely this fog holds, only the gods know.”

Later, the gray thickened and became a swathe of black velvet wrapped about the ship. No moon, no star pierced the velour curtain.

A woman came with fish and a flagon of wine. Yannul, now much recovered, kept her through the night.

All next day they drifted through the fog. It was a silent ghost world. Shapes emerged from it resembling galleys, mountains, or great birds, all melting before impact, folding in on themselves in charcoal subsidences.

In the polished metal that served as mirror, Raldnor saw how the gray tinge had invaded his hair. For a while it would mimic the hair of any of the crew, that pale black common to the sailor. It was the salt in the winds. Soon the salt would scour out the last of the black dye, and there would be no replacing it from the broken bottle he had found among his things after the storm. He would be then naked among his enemies, a yellow-haired man, a Lowlander: Plains scum. Yet curiously, in the regions of the fog, none of this seemed greatly to matter. He, like the ship, was adrift without compass or sight of land. There being no remedy, there seemed also no great distress.

Men lowered the body of Drokler into the iron water. The short, harsh Zakorian prayer was spoken. He sank like lead, for weights had been put in his boots to make his going hasty.

About an hour after this makeshift burial, the insubstantial prison around them began to break up. Inside an hour the waves were empty of anything but themselves and the night.

Not a trace of land in any direction could be seen. Such instruments as the ship had owned to divine her position, had been lost. The night had provided neither stars nor any moon.

A slight wind moved Rom’s Daughter.

Toward midnight the watch horn sounded. Ahead and to larboard there was a red flickering on the horizon.

“By Zarduk, the beacons of Saardos!” one of the officers cried out. A cheer went up. They had all feared some kind of disaster, adrift in the ghost world.

The wind was against them, blowing for the west, so they set down where they were to wait for morning. There were beer casks breached and emptied. Raldnor saw Jurl drinking in the shadow of the king mast—that peculiar and specific drinking which showed neither pleasure nor intoxication. His rowers would take them into Saardos tomorrow, and no doubt he would drive them hard.

Saardos. And after Saardos, the Plains. Raldnor thought of it in the dark of his cabin. And somewhere in the dark there came to him a sense of incompleteness—this ending was altogether too provident. It was an intimation of destiny which he neither knew nor answered.

Dawn woke him, a dawn like the cinders of a rose. Also a sound that had no place in a man’s dreams.

Yannul still slept, without a girl for once. Above, the levels of the ship creaked and settled. The sound pierced through wood and flesh and bone and exacerbated his ears.

On the deck the ashy crimson light that had squeezed in at the cabin slit below the tower was one great indissoluble wash across the sky and sea. Everything else was black in silhouette—the huge king mast with its slightly bloated sail, the bulk of the tower, the sweeping prow, the groups and huddles of men and women, all quite still, standing gazing out across the water to the scarlet flickering of the horizon, listening. It was a low, unhuman droning note, like some enormous pipe sounding far down in the crust of the world. But it had no definite location—rather it was all around them, ambient as the morning.

One of the women began to wail abruptly, crying of devils in the sea. A big man came hulking from the rail and struck her hard across the face as he passed her.

“Shut your mouth, trull.”

It was Jurl. He made for the galley hatch without a look to either side, his grim, sneering face devoid of any feeling. Somewhere on the deck, Elon’s voice rang out. Men jumped to their work, the women scuttled to ropes. The anchor was drawn up, the sail set. Abruptly the ship lurched into life as the oars below struck water. She began to move, straining, before the slight warm wind, with every semblance of life. Yet she only seemed living. The dawn was stopped still. No sun rose and no darkness fell; only the rosy grayness persisted. And with it the demon’s piping that seemed its vocal expression.

Raldnor stood at the rail.

There came a sudden crack of thunder beneath the sea, which did not surprise him, though his guts turned cold with an automatic fear. The piping ceased. A great roiling turmoil of movement below the ship pitched him down across her deck, as a lightning erupted from the sea. The light grew big, swelling from crimson into savage white. A rain fell on his face and hands and neck, a black burning rain. Men screamed. There came a wind over the ship like the rustling wings of a great bird composed of fire.

He pulled himself up against the rail and stared over the plunging sea.

The ocean was tumultuous with the pangs of birth, but it was a monstrous, a terrifying child: smoldering ebony, the cone stretched up to spit into the sky. Breakers burst in white steam against its molten buttresses. From the gaping mouth spewed lightning and a blazing vomit.

“Mountain of Fire!”

The frenzied cry racked across the deck. It was the legend of Aarl, the burning stacks that rose from the sea—dragons’ mouths belching up pyrotechnic blasts. The Zakorians yelled their horror. They were in hell, and the eternal agony had begun.

Raldnor stumbled back along the deck and pulled wide the doorway in the tower. He tried to shout to them to seek sanctuary inside, but men turned their blanched faces and their blind wide eyes on him and away, their mouths extending cries. A glittering needle hail of embers fell abruptly into their midst. There was a rush for the hatches, and now some came for the tower. They collided, fought and cursed each other at the entry. Beyond their struggling, Raldnor saw the sky split over the sea cone’s maw, and white explosions burst in the water. Rom’s Daughter bucked the length of her body. Men rolled shrieking down the deck, over the rail, into the boiling waves. A plume of fire appeared like a miracle on the sail.

Beneath them all, he felt the motion of the oars stagger to a halt.

The picture came to him, disastrously clear, the panic that had seized them once again in the dark and personal hell of the rowers’ deck. He thrust through the press at the door and at the hatchway and somehow got down into that reeking place. They were in uproar, and there was no beater on the platform. Where Jurl had taken himself was beyond questioning at this time. Raldnor seated himself at the oars master’s station and took up the hammer, as once before. With thunderous strokes he began the rhythm. A half lull came; they were slaves in their own way to that inexorable beat.

“Row!” he shouted at them.

“The ship’s on fire!” a man yelled. Others cried out in unison.

He brought the hammer smashing down.

“Do I use this on the block or on your heads? Put your backs into it, you sniveling fools!”

They cringed and held to their places. He had assumed Jurl’s voice and manner. Almost as one, they snatched back their oars.

A crash came from above, dim screams, the bald flare of fire.

He increased the strokes of the hammer. It was the speed of war he used, for ramming or for flight. He left them no room for their terror.

When the first breath of safety came, he knew by instinct only. Beyond the hatches the ocean was like blood and ink, yet the judderings had left the ship. He slowed their speed, then ceased beating. They sank on their oars like dead men.

He went up the ladder, but the hatch was hard to lift. When he got it open, he found the dead lying across it.

The dead also lay about the deck. The planks were thick with them and with a fluttering violet ash. Little fires trickled here and there; a few men were creeping from cover to deal with them. The sail flamed. Cinders swirled like moths. The air was thick and turgid with smoke.

Behind them now, the volcano was fading in the murk, still a blare of red or white. The distant rumbling filled the sea.

For miles the water was full of burned things. They cast their own human corpses down to join them. This time, there were no prayers.

16

The wind hummed in the patched sail.

“We no longer hold a course,” Elon said. “Our instruments are smashed. The stars indicate we’re far from Alisaar, but their configurations are strange and altogether untrustworthy. Tullut tells me he thinks the dust from the fire mountain distorts the size and pattern of things in the sky. Who can doubt it? Last night the moon was huge, the color of a blue plum. No, we can’t judge our way by star charts.”

“Turn back,” Jurl growled, facing him across Drokler’s table.

“And pass again through the Gates of Fire? We lost half our crew to the storm and the burning mountain, and ten oarsmen. There’d be mutiny if I told them to risk that way again.”

“You’re too soft, too gentle altogether, Elon. They’d mutiny because they know you’d let them. Resign your position to me. We’ll see things settled then.”

“It would seem you resigned your own position to the volcano,” Raldnor said.

Jurl swung about.

“Why does this landsdog sit at council with us?”

“Because, Jurl, he has twice proved himself a better oars master than you,” Elon said.

“Where were you, Jurl, when we passed the fire?” Tullut, the younger of the two officers, cried out.

“Below, about my own business.”

“Saving your worthless, diseased and filthy skin!”

Elon banged on the table top to silence the altercation.

“The wind blows us southeasterly,” he said in a sober and dispassionate voice. “The watch have seen flocks of birds, which should mean land of some sort.”

“There’s no land in these seas.”

“Probably an island, too small to have been charted. Nevertheless, we may hope for fresh water, and perhaps meat. We’ll rest the men there. After that we can decide on what to do with ourselves and our ship.”

They cut a notch in the door lintel of the tower at each sunset. The sea was exceptionally, searingly blue; sometimes patches like blue fire moved over it. The skies were strange colors by day; at night men made superstitious signs against the amethyst moon, the vitriolic lemon of the stars.

The food, rationed since the storm, began to bear hard on them. No longer were there dinners at Drokler’s table—only the fish stews and dried biscuit common to all.

The burned men lay under awning on the deck, groaning, muttering, weeping; howling for water, the dull-eyed women tending them as best they could. In the predawn gray of the fifth day past the volcano, Raldnor woke from a deadly sleep and, going up on deck, became aware of a peculiar and ominous silence. Not a man cried out, not even a whisper sounded.

Yannul, coming after him, stopped still and said: “Can they all have died?”

“Indeed they can,” a man’s voice said sneeringly, almost with amusement. “With a little help.”

Jurl stepped out from under the awning. He carried his knife flamboyantly, letting them see the blood. A couple of sailors slunk out after him, making less of it.

“You’ve butchered them,” Yannul said. His hand went to his own knife, then fell away uselessly.

“Why let them go on eating our share of rations?” one of Jurl’s men blurted. “They’d’ve died tomorrow—the day after. Better off dead they were.”

“Shut your mouth,” Jurl rapped. “Do we need make apologies to land scum?”

He swung past, his acolytes hurrying after.

Dawn tinged the sea.

Yannul swore in a virulent undertone.

“Will you refuse an extra share of the food?” Raldnor said softly, gazing out at the rim of the sun. “As Jurl’s friend told us, they’d have died anyway, and in great pain. Now they rest, and we eat.”

Yannul turned to stare at him, but in the expanding light a new surprise usurped the first.

“Raldnor,” he said, “your hair—is white.”

Raldnor did not look at him. His eyes and face were quite blank.

“Sea salt,” he said quietly. “It bleaches out the best dye. I’m a Lowlander, Yannul.”

Yannul swore again, softly.

“I thought in Abissa . . . I wondered—But, Raldnor, all that time in Koramvis—you dared that deception with Amrek?”

“An irony worthy of the annals of the old myths I used to read. Yes, I was Amrek’s nearest Commander. I stood at his right hand. I nearly bedded his mother; certainly I took his betrothed. I fell from my office because of simple indiscretion, not race. There was no hint of my blood. I was Dortharian, and my crimes suited me excellently. I am Amrek’s brother.”

“His brother—”

“Rehdon’s son. Not by Val Mala, as you will surmise. Ashne’e carried me, the amber-haired witch. She accommodated me in the womb which killed my father.” The words had come flooding from him, yet he felt no release at speaking, or any pain. On the horizon a dark cloud was resting against the sea, blotting out the lower hemisphere of the sun.

“Then, by the law of Dorthar, you’re their King,” Yannul said. There seemed to be no doubt or query in his voice; both the situation and the curious blank face of the teller carried their own conviction. Besides, Yannul had always sensed some vein of mystery in this man he had called a friend.

“The King of Dorthar.”

Raldnor smiled blindly at the sea, at his own thoughts. “There’s the island Elon promised us,” he said.

Yannul, startled, turned about and saw it. Simultaneously the watch yelled from above, and men came running to the deck.

It was a mere small silhouette lashed by the sea. It had no look of home. Yet men shouted and pummeled each other’s shoulders.

Only the dead men under the awning continued their silence, as if they were wiser, or more content.

The island.

It was formed in the shape of a flat platter; at its center steep-built rocks, smoking with white falls, splayed above into a broad plateau. Jungle rose in blue-black tiers from the beach, noisy with birds. They flew in flocks, wheeled screaming in the sky, vocal with alarm at this invasion.

Rorn’s Daughter cast down her anchor in the bay and the boats put out; only the women and a handful of the men were left behind with their officers to watch the ship.

Their legs were uncertain on the ground. Men rolled and played like babies in the nacreous sand.

Elon split them into parties to fetch water or food. Tullut and Ilrud fashioned slings and brought down the bright birds for meat. Others splashed in sapphire pools, scooped gourds full of these sapphires, then spilled them, tossed them over their heads, yelling. It was a land of plenty indeed, this place where things could be wasted.

No men lived here—at least, they saw none.

Yannul plucked an orchid and tucked it in a rent in his shirt.

“Do you think I could persuade a few of these to grow in some earth on the ship? This sort of flower would fetch coins from the ladies of Alisaar.”

Many of them were talking of Alisaar now, and of Zakoris. Even this little ground had made them optimistic. They looked less narrowly at the bluer-than-blue fiery sea.

As they sat on the beach with their grilled meat and fresh water, a group of men came running from the forest, carrying yellow fruit. There had been a deal of craziness, but these men looked wild and mad, garlanded with flowers, laughing uproariously.

“What’s this?” Elon asked them.

“A rare fruit—a wonderful fruit,” a man cried out. “It goes to your head like a wine of Xarabiss.”

Tullut clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

“Did you eat it? Foolish of you. None of us know what grows here. It might be poisonous.”

“Might be—might be—”

Men mimicked him. They were drunk indeed, juice dribbling on their chins, throats and chests as they scrabbled again for the yellow fruit.

Elon turned away. Men capered up the beach.

Raldnor saw Jurl emerge from the nearest tree line, two or three of his followers trailing after. He came to the fruit pile and picked about in it.

“It’s good then?”

“But not necessarily good to eat,” Elon said. “I thought you were to stay aboard the ship, Jurl, to keep your rowers in order.”

“Only the Aarl lords will trouble Rom’s bitch in this sea. I rode the boats as you did, deck master.” Jurl took a bite at the flesh of the fruit and ate, grinning open-mouthed. “The men are better judges of the table than you, Elon.” He hefted a couple of the fruits and went to eat them at another fire about which the drunken men were dancing.

Gradually, one by one, some uneasily, some swaggering, men went to join him. They were of his faction, believing in his brutal authority, or else excited by his lack of scruple. There had been several cries of approval over the dead men under the awning.

Soon the group about Jurl grew murderously loud. They began to push out the boats again, skipping and guffawing.

“They’ll bring in the watch off the ship,” Tullut exclaimed. “Deck master, she should have some guard, whatever deserted sea we’re in.”

Elon stared at the white hem of the water.

“Do I have authority to stop him, Tullut? There seem to be few men about this fire.”

“They’re drunk on the fruit, woman-weak—”

Elon got up without another word. Stiff as a plank, he walked down the beach toward the crazy garlanded men and their boats. Raldnor rose; Tullut, Yannul and a few others followed, falling into step behind him as he went after Elon. The wheeling birds embroidered the sky in slow persistent circles.

Suddenly Jurl came thrusting out of the press. The fruit had intoxicated him, though he had not adopted the other men’s garlands or mannerisms. Like a man accustomed to wine, his character had not been blurred or altered, but rather sharpened, accentuated.

“What are you doing, Jurl?” Elon said.

“Bringing the last men and oars-pigs, and the whores from the ship. You wouldn’t deny them the island, would you?”

“They’ll be denied nothing. I’ll send a relief party shortly, when the men are rested.”

“The ship needs no guard, Elon. Not here.”

“I haven’t ordered you to disband the watch.”

“You. You no longer order anything. Go chew your bread and water, my lady, while we men enjoy ourselves.”

“You’ll answer for this in Hanassor,” Elon said softly into the silence.

“Hanassor.” Jurl spat. He had not caught their faith. “If and when is good enough. And I’ll have charges of my own. Against that landsdog at your shoulder, for one. By Zarduk, Dortharian, can’t you keep your nose out of anything?”

“The beach is as much mine as yours,” Raldnor said, “and your voice carries a good way.”

Jurl’s hand flickered at his belt and came back with the knife. The silence crackled.

“Put away your blade,” Elon said.

A man giggled, high like an excited girl.

“Let’s have them fight—Ten draks on the oars master.”

Voices cheered raucously.

“Well, Dortharian, do you take me? You’ve seen this blade used before,” Jurl said. “Milk hair.”

Raldnor’s hand moved in its own practiced manner, and produced a knife. One or two men noticed the professional intimacy of the gesture, and some of the cheers broke off.

“Yes, you’ve used the blade before—on half-dead men,” Raldnor said. “I’ll take you.”

Jurl started forward, but somehow Elon interposed himself. Jurl turned snarling and slashed into the deck master’s body. Red splashed on the white ground. Red licked up Jurl’s knife like flame. Jurl jumped sideways for the nearest boat, men leaping after him. They pulled for Rom’s Daughter and were out in the bay moments after Elon fell.

Tullut ran forward and took Elon’s head on his knee, but Elon’s eyes were already filmed over and opaque with death. His blood soaked in the sand.

They buried him in the sand and shingle at the fringe of the jungle, but it was shallow soil. They struck stone too soon. There were animals, too, not seen before and not showing themselves now, only little rustlings in the forest, bright blinks of eyes, to intimate their presence. And the birds flew round the darkening sky, wailing their greed. So the man raked off the sand and piled on twigs and creeper, and fired them. It was a cleaner burial, but the stench of burning flesh drove them far along the beach.

Tullut moved away from them all and stood alone in the twilight as the charcoal ashes that were Elon blew and smoldered. It was not a man’s part to weep, and, if he must, he grieved in hiding. It came to Raldnor, with sudden remembered pain, how he too had once restrained his tears as he walked behind Eraz’s bier at Hamos.

A huge moon floated over the trees.

A red glare spiraled and smoked from the plateau above, and sounds of singing and pipes and noisy calls came over the wash of the sea and the small muted thunder of the falls.

The boats had come back to the island as they carried the tinder to Elon’s body. Laughing men and screeching women had exploded across the beach into the trees, carrying lanterns and casks of beer from Drokler’s private storage hold. Now they drank, and ate the fruit, and sang around their fires on the rock.

Tullut came walking slowly back across the sand, his face in shadow.

“Tullut!” A sailor caught his arm, “Tullut, let’s take a boat, get to the ship and sail her. There must be some safe way home. We can leave them their island.”

“No,” Tullut said.

The tide had climbed higher up the sand, hushing in slow pale whispers, like a mother with a child.

“By Zarduk,” the sailor said, “it wouldn’t make me sad if the fruit poisoned them as you said it would, Tullut. That’d be justice. I shouldn’t trouble.”

The last glimmer of light sank in the sea. A woman’s voice burst out in high song on the plateau.

Yannul stirred uneasily. He said to Raldnor, very low: “They’re hard bitches, most of them, they can take care of themselves. But there was a little girl—from Alisaar, I think—a Zakorian pirate took her when she was a mite. She was tough on deck, but she got scared at night. There may be too much fun up there. Would you object if I went up and got her back?”

“Your gallantry does you credit. But the getting may be slightly harder than you suppose. I’ll go with you. Two soldiers from Ryhgon’s school should be a match for twenty or so drunken Zakorians.”

They sidled away from the group on the beach and abruptly took to the indigo channels of the forest.

It began in a sort of grim humorousness, that climb through the jungle. It eased the tension in both of them, brought back certain pleasant memories of conspiracies at Lin Abissa. Yet, as they moved steadily upward, the presence of the forest began to steal on them, to overpower them with its flat, dark essence.

The gut of the jungle was all shadow, with edges of icy blue where the moon tipped its leaves. It purred and rustled and throbbed. Those small numerous eyes that had ignited below at the edge of the beach winked like stars in the undergrowth. The grasses crackled with the flame of unfelt winds.

“Spies everywhere,” Yannul whispered.

But neither of them smiled. To Raldnor it seemed the whole forest pressed close, all of it animate, watching, hostile. He felt for the first time the coldness of the shadows that were not cold in any physical sense, the oppression, the almost psychic smells of age, of something ripening on its own rottenness. The island, quiescent by day, stirring at nightfall, had breathed into its own dark life and found itself penetrated and deflowered. They had disturbed its primeval dusk. It hated them.

The plateau leaped abruptly into orange nearness through tall fern.

On the bald rock men and their whores shouted and sang, eating their fill and drinking from the broached barrels. A great bonfire flapped its skirt at the sky. Two or three women were dancing naked, holding burning twigs in their hands in imitation of the fire-dancers of Zarduk.

“Do you see your girl?” Raldnor asked.

“No. We’ll have to move closer.”

A few steps more and a female figure jumped up.

“Yanl of the Lans—and Ralnar,” she slurred, immediately knowing them both, particularly Yannul, but she was not the one Yannul sought. She led them to the fire, nevertheless, and gave them beer, and wound her arms about Yannul. At this, a man came staggering up, his eyes bloodshot.

“You’re with me, Hanot. Don’t waste your time on that landsdog. Jurl’ll want to know you’ve seen fit to join us, masters,” he jeered and careened off, dragging the woman with him.

“There she is, little Rella or Rilka, I forget her name,” Yannul said, “and having trouble, too.”

He ran toward a disturbance in the shadows, with Raldnor following. They pulled up four sailors and dealt with them swiftly. Yannul half-lifted a struggling, clawing girl, and convinced her, at the cost of almost losing his eyes, that he was not part of the prolonged rape which had been planned, but Yannul, to whom she had told her secret fears in the dark. She was small-boned, with a fine straight profile uncommon among Zakorians. She might indeed have been an Alisaarian. She smiled at him uncertainly, but her trust quickly gave way to a look of pure fright.

“Well, so we’re to be honored after all,” Jurl’s voice said behind them. “The dogs have come to fill their bellies.”

“Back to back for the fight,” Raldnor said to Yannul, “like the training floor at Abissa.” He found a savage grin on his face. “But first an appetizer. This man’s Ryhgon’s breed, and we both have a score to settle with him.”

He could not make out Jurl’s face against the fire. It did not matter. A sudden seething and intolerable hate came on him. He knew abruptly that it did not belong to him, but had filled him like an empty vessel. Hatred—the island was alive with it. It crawled in his blood, in his brain.

He felt the dead places of his mind tear open in a swift, unlooked-for agony. Not Anici or Astaris to enter them now—no sweet woman with thoughts like splintering crystal, no otherself all warm fire. Not now. This was an alien, a dreadful and unstoppable thing. A possession. He felt the entity collect itself, focusing through the jungle’s purple eye, yet seeking expression incredibly through his own. He felt something break out of him. It was horror and fear. But it made him grin and laugh in an impossible madman’s triumph.

Jurl suddenly shuddered and clutched at his throat, his belly. A sharp cry burst from his mouth. He fell and screamed and clawed, and rolled into the fire.

All around them panic dropped on the feasters. They grew silent, heads raised like the heads of animals snuffing the wind, tensed for the first feeling of pain.

It came swift, that retribution. They leaped and shrieked like demons in the glare of the flames, all caught in a pattern of terror and death.

Yannul said urgently to the girl: “Did you eat the fruit?”

“They gave me beer and fruit,” she whispered, her eyes wide, “but I hadn’t had food for three days. I sicked it up.”

“Good girl,” said Yannul, proud of her, his face very pale.

“There’s nothing we can do here,” Raldnor said.

He turned back into the trees, shaking like an old man after fever, and they followed him.

The forest was very silent as they made their way back through the shadows. No eyes opened. There was only the sound of the falls, the sea.

On the beach Tullut’s men sat huddled at their fire.

“The fruit was poisonous, Tullut,” Yannul said, “in the end.”

His Alisaarian girl began to cry. He comforted her.

They slept by the fire. At dawn Tullut took two men with him to the plateau to see if any had been purged of the poison and still lived—as did Yannul’s girl. They came back inside the hour. They did not say what they had seen on the plateau; certainly no one returned with them.

They took what was left of the bird meat and barrels filled with fresh water and rowed for the ship. There was a full wind blowing—a warm, not an angry wind. It blew them out of sight of the island. They were glad enough. Ten men and one woman were all that remained to crew this tattered, burned hag-ship, once a beautiful thing, riding proud on the western seas. They were not enough to take her oars; they could only let the wind push them as it wished. They were all tired out, immobilized and drained by what had been done to them. Many days passed; they did not cut notches and lost count of them. Overhead the position of the stars was strange. There came a lull.

“I’m finished, Ralnar Am Dorthar,” Tullut said, addressing Raldnor by the name he had chosen to go by. “The food is gone, the wind’s stopped. This blue sea has no end. We’re becalmed in hell. The voyage was cursed from the beginning.”

“You took ill luck with you,” Raldnor said. “Don’t you say it’s bad fortune to carry a felon or a wanted man?”

“Oh, some sailors’ yarn. Most of our men were felons, Ralnar. They’ve paid for it, I think. There’s some talk among us—to make a death pact. It’s our custom. This is an arduous way to reach the gods.”

“There’s been too much death,” Raldnor said.

“I know it, Ralnar. Elon was my father—Did they tell you? He got me on a girl at Hanassor, only a Zastis mistake, but he saw me schooled, bought me my commission on this ship. This damned ship. I inherited too much of him. He was a good man, but it’s weakness in me.”

Raldnor said gently: “I guessed your grief, though you hid it very well. I, too, once held back grief so no one should see it. A man should have no shame in weeping.”

“No, Ralnar. But then our customs are different. How is it your hair turned white after the burning mountain? I’ve heard it happens from shock or fear, but you’re a brave man. You were braver than that bastard Jurl.”

“It’s the mark of another fear,” Raldnor said, “an older fear. A fear of betraying who I was.”

Tullut looked at him but asked no question. He took Raldnor’s hand in a gesture of friendship.

“Well, you must do as you wish, Ralnar. Yannul too, and Resha will do as he does, no doubt. We have our own way. I hope your luck may change. I doubt it will.”

He went below as had the other Zakorians. They did not come up again.

So she lay, a ship of death, and at dusk three birds came flying over the mast.

“Land near,” Yannul cried. “Perhaps better than the last.”

The moon swam cold into the sky and brought a cold wind. It blew them through the night, and there were big fish leaping silver in the water.

Resha fell asleep at Yannul’s side. At last only Raldnor still watched. He saw the black shape of the land come up out of the ocean like a huge beast.

As the sun rose, the heights of the land were drenched with carmine, while its valleys were black, as if in retention of the night.

He thought of Tullut. “None of us,” he thought, “wait long enough. Whatever god, whatever destiny, is at work must have time.” And in the midst of death, he felt the surge of hope in him, and leaned and woke Yannul out of sleep.

17

Having brought them within sight of land, the wind abandoned them. There were dark forests along the coast, rocky inlets, a backbone of crags. It seemed a turbulent landscape, and untenanted by men.

The heat of the day came down from the sky, up from the ocean.

Raldnor, as he sat alone at the rail, made out a movement in the sea, and thought it was a fish. But the fish swam on the surface, never dipping in the water. Shortly he realized it was a narrow boat, made of some hollowed black tree, similar to the fishing canoes of Zakoris. One figure occupied it—a man, rowing with strong easy motions. As he drew closer, coming quite obviously for the ship, Raldnor saw his sunburned face, empty of surprise or curiosity, a face quite closed in on itself, yet at peace. The man’s hair was very long, lying over his shoulders, chest and back.

In color it was corn yellow.

The pulses kicked in Raldnor’s body. He lifted an arm and hailed the rower. In turn the man raised his hand briefly; he did not call.

The narrow boat came alongside where the ladder trailed in the water. The man climbed up on deck and stood facing Raldnor. They were of an equal height, but the stranger’s body, though muscular, was thin almost to the bone. He wore only a cloth about his middle; the rest of him was tanned, but with that pale clear tan of the white-skinned, which fades with the cold.

“You’re a Lowlander,” Raldnor said, and he laughed, his eyes extraordinarily full of water.

The stranger clearly did not understand his speech, did not attempt to speak himself. He gestured to the boat below and indicated that Raldnor should follow him. Raldnor shook his head, pointed to the tower and called Yannul and the girl.

The man showed no concern. The boat did not seem large enough, but somehow he placed all three of them in it and took up the oars, rowing in the same easy movement as before. Little patches of the blue fire ran before them, almost playfully. The ship fell behind, a ragged skeleton, black on the sky. Ahead, the land drew closer. The boat appeared to be making for an area of thick forest where a rocky promontory stretched out into the sea. There were no signs of life there, but faint blue smokes rose from the tree-covered slopes above.

The man never spoke or moved his lips. His mouth had an indefinable strangeness about it, as if it had never been used to form words. Perhaps he was dumb. A dumb Lowlander, Raldnor mused in surprise.

The canoe was beached. The stranger moved to the first line of trees. There was a clay vessel set in the shade. He gave them water, then led them up into the forest.

It was a house of wood—a tall, wide hall built of mud clay over a frame of staves, with its black knotty pillars and mainstays the great trees themselves. The roof was full of leaves and nesting birds, which shook off their droppings on the floor, and sang in sweet fluting voices, and flew incessantly in and out of the high window spaces. The forest people lived in the wooden house, bathed in the clear streams below, cooked at innumerable fires on the open place above. They ate neither meat nor fish, most of their food being raw: berries and fruit, plants and leaves and milk from their small herd of black goats. They were a yellow-haired race, and light-eyed. None of them spoke. It came to Raldnor at last, as he lay in the shade of the wooden house near sunfall, that they did not speak because they had no need. They, like the Lowlanders, came together in their minds, and being more at peace, more content with their life, saw no need to express themselves in any other way. He felt a sense of angry despair, finding himself again with this key of communication, which should have been his birthright, freshly denied him. He was once more a cripple, a deaf mute among the hearing, speaking ones.

Yannul and the girl Resha seemed more ill at ease than he, though they were all well enough looked after. The silence troubled them, though for different reasons.

An indigo night settled, like the birds, on the wooden house, glinting with white bird-eye stars. Raldnor rose and went out into the cool. Fireflies darted a gold embroidery from thicket to thicket. Below, the soft thunder of the sea.

As he stood there, someone came walking through the trees toward him, light as an animal. He sensed rather than heard her come. For some reason his skin prickled.

At once there was an old woman, near him, in the starlight.

She was dressed, as were all the forest people, only in a cloth tied about her middle; yet, despite her age, there was nothing ugly in her body, though she had neither the smooth skin nor the firm breasts of the young women. Her hair was faded and streaked but still fine, and very long. Her eyes were strange, large and yellow as an owl’s. She seated herself cross-legged on the grass with a suppleness that gave him pause; she indicated that he too should sit, facing her.

She stared in his face. After a moment there came a startling, fearful flicker in his brain. He flinched; sweat broke out on him. It was to be hard this time, though without pain.

“Cease struggling,” a voice said suddenly and quite distinctly in his skull.

He lapsed, shivering, against the bole of a tree, and the voice said: “There is nothing you need fear.”

He did not comprehend how he could understand her, for they did not know the language of the lands he had come from. That much had been plain. He strove for expression. The voice said: “I use no language, only thought. You interpret in your own way, which suits you best.”

It had no gender, this voice. He tried to question it, blindly. An answer came.

“There are many in this land. Not all live as we do. Yet all could speak within, at need. You are of our people, yet you could not speak within. Some of us are more sensitive and more strong—we are the delvers. We seek out pain in the sick mind, and cure it. I am sent to you to cure your pain, so that you may speak as it is your right to do. I see now there have been others. Both women. Lovers. Ice hair and fire hair. To these you could speak; such a thing has its logic. Have no fear of me; I see your grief. Let me see all. I will help you to be yourself.”

But his mind cried out at hers in angry hurt.

“So there is another land,” the voice said, “and dark men who rule it. We have old stories of such a place. Do not fear your half-blood. It is your strength and not your trouble. I see your mother, back down the long corridors of your memory. Look, there is your mother. Do you see her? That is how you saw her as a newborn child. Thin she is, sick from bearing you. But how beautiful. There is strength, true strength, hard as the forest tree. Think what lay behind her, and before. Would you call this woman weak? Do you think she left you nothing of herself? Yes, weep, poor child. Know her, and weep. She is your spirit, and the other half is a King.” Then there was a curious inflection in the voice, a kind of sorrow. “You imagine yourself so little, Raldnor, son of Ashne’e, son of Rehdon, Dragon King. So little.”

There was a lance of fire in his skull, yet no pain. A darkness swirled like the sea, but there was no fear. Now the voice, which led him like a guide through the unknown dark rooms of his own brain, had assumed a sex and a name. It had become Ashne’e’s.

Yannul whistled as he crossed the clearing behind the wooden house at noon. Resha sat, as she always did, outside, staring dejectedly down across the slope at men and women moving in the thin forest below. They had been here ten days and had adopted the forest people’s mode of dress. Resha looked very well in it, and, certainly, she had worn little more aboard Rorn’s Daughter. Yannul lightly ruffled her hair. He thought of her generally rather as he had long ago thought of his sisters, with a protective amusement, tempered by occasional slight irritation. Their sexual unions did not disrupt this attitude, for in Lan, where farmsteads were remote from each other, it was neither uncommon nor frowned upon for sisters either to couple with, or even marry, their brothers, or sometimes their sires.

“Well, Resha of Alisaar, I told you I would communicate somehow with them, didn’t I?”

“You did, Lannic man. In Alisaar, boasters are whipped.”

“Are they, indeed? Well, well. No wonder you jumped aboard a Zakorian pirate rather than stay to lose your skin—No, don’t clout me on the ear! Hear me out. I have had a little conversation with some of the men. Truly, a simple method. We drew pictures on slate and waved our arms about. I’ve learned a good deal. Over these hills there are cities—great cities, with kings and palaces and taverns and entirely suitable whore shops. Ah! Bite me now, would you? Listen, little banalik, when Raldnor comes back from wherever it is he went with that old woman, you and I and he will seek our fortune over the hills. They talk there—by mouth. We can soon pick up their tongue. Imagine a city ruled by a yellow-haired king.”

“We’ll be outlanders—scum,” she grumbled. “They’ll burn us or stone us as the Vis of Dorthar do the Plains people.”

“No, Resha. Judge by these. Are we outcast here? Yellow-haired men, I’ve observed, have more justice. Did you know Raldnor was a Lowlander?”

“He was brave,” she said. “I did my best to win his favor on the ship, but he was celibate and pure. A good man.”

“And the son of Rehdon, the High King. Yes, that makes big eyes. It whets your appetite even more, doesn’t it, you shameless piece? Up now, and I’ll teach you to juggle and stand on your hands. We’ll need a trade where we’re going.”

The dusk came on, and little black bats fluttered among the trees.

Yannul and Resha lay in the shade. She had worked obediently, and her body—strong and supple from ship’s labor—was quick to learn, though far too enticing. In the red slanting rays of sunfall he had pulled her down for other lessons.

Now, in the lengthening shadows, a man came walking through the trees toward them.

“Ralnar,” Resha said.

Yannul looked up and studied the figure. Yes, he knew it. Skin burned almost black by the sun—the tan of the Vis—and hair salt-bleached to white, long now as Yannul’s own. Yet, as the man came nearer, Yannul hesitated to greet him and checked again the physique and face, as if uncertain after all. They had all suffered and all been changed on the nightmare voyage, and then had come this nine-day absence, during which Raldnor was hidden with the old wise-woman. But did any of these things account for the vast, oddly inexplicable differences Yannul saw in Raldnor? He crossed the little clearing and came to a halt by them, looking down. His expression was remote, as if he saw them from a long way off, still—as if he did not know them well. His eyes were wide, burning, clear. Yannul thought, with uneasy amusement: “That old one, she’s been feeding him incense leaves. He’s been having visions in the forest.” But this did not seem applicable. Yannul fathomed it suddenly. “He’s been emptied, scoured, cauterized. Then filled. Filled with something better.” But he said aloud: “You look strange. Were you ill?”

“No, Yannul,” Raldnor said. Even his voice was somehow altered. Now it was the voice—Yes, of a king. The forest fell peculiarly silent all around them. “For the first time in my life,” Raldnor said, “I am at peace with myself. A rare and wonderful gift.”

He turned and walked away from them, toward the wooden house or the sea.

Resha whispered: “He’s marked for a god.”

Her fingers fluttered in a swift religious sign. Yannul cursed her.

“Don’t be a fool. He’s had misfortunes. Perhaps the old woman helped him bear them.”

“No. I’ve seen that look on the faces of priests before they jump from the rocks into the sea, to honor Rorn.”

“Do you mean you think he’ll die? Be quiet, you stupid girl.”

Resha looked at Yannul in scorn.

“From now on, Lannic lout, all men will be to him only like dust on the wind or blowing sea spray. None of us could harm him. He is his god’s. And the gods protect their own.”

In the morning there were new men in the wooden house. They, too, were of the forest people, almost indistinguishable in coloring and style of dress. They had brought with them three riding mounts—milk-white zeebas of unusual size—and linen garments suitable for two men and a woman.

Yannul marveled.

“They’re very prompt to supply our wants. How did you get them to understand you, Raldnor?”

“I can speak with them now,” Raldnor said.

Yannul said nothing further. He had heard the stories of the Lowlanders’ telepathic abilities, and, having already seen evidence of it in these alien forests, accepted Raldnor’s part in it with a shudder of unease. To Resha, nothing Raldnor did at this time was too wonderful. He was his god’s, which accounted for everything.

They left the wooden house before noon, leading the white zeebas up the narrow forest tracks, with one of the yellow-haired men walking ahead. The tree shade grew intense, then diminished. They reached a rocky summit, and below stretched rolling ocher grassland under a cobalt sky. Their guide pointed down and away. Raldnor nodded. The man turned and vanished back among the trees.

“Where are we headed for?” Yannul called, as they left the rock and mounted. “A town? Or that city they mentioned?”

“There are three cities here in the Plain. I shall make for the first of these, but naturally, you’ll have your own plans.”

“I planned to ply my old trade,” Yannul said, ill at ease as they rode. “A city would be a healthy place for it. And you?”

“I have business with their king, whoever he is.”

“Their king! You’re ambitious.”

“I always was, Yannul. I obtained status but no direction. Now, I’m driven, obsessed.”

“To do what?”

“To get my birthright. My second birthright. Already this land’s given me the first.”

“High King of Vis,” Yannul said. “A difficult task.”

“No, Yannul. That essential thing is merely secondary. My kingdom is in the Lowlands. They had their own lords in the past. Now, they have a lord again.”

Yannul glanced at him. Raldnor seemed calm, remote, his passionate words untinged by emotion. Then Raldnor turned in the saddle and looked full at him. For the first time the Lan felt the force of an incredible personal power stream like light out of the Lowlander—a power that seemed alive, fathomless, indestructible. It was an awesome thing to witness in a man he had known only as a man; for now, Yannul saw, whether at the whim of a god or not, Raldnor had become something more.

“What did the wise-woman do to you?” Yannul said, trying to grin.

“Removed my blindness, woke me out of sleep. Gave me the purpose I was born to.”

The passionless voice was, nevertheless, filled, like the face before Yannul, with the same vast strength.

“You look as if you’d eat these cities to get what you want—swallow the sea to reach the plains of Vis.”

“A harsh diet. Yet, whatever I have to do, I will do,” Raldnor said.

Yannul let the reins slacken a little. Raldnor’s zeeba moved ahead of him. It had a certain aptness. The white-haired man seemed to have outstripped them all. Yannul drew in a deep breath of the alien summer air. Whatever fire burned in Raldnor had scorched him, too. He knew he was no longer a free man. If any of them were any longer free. Even in the quiet, insect-humming afternoon, he sensed forces of disruption, of retribution, stirring underground. A cataclysm was coming, a leveling, a wind from chaos. They would all be caught in it, like fish in nets. And there, riding before him, was this unknown man, this comrade once called friend, who was to be the fisherman.

18

It was a three days’ journey. They passed first through a scattering of villages and two small towns, all paying tax to the city, which in turn protected them from bandits by means of troops. Though physically resembling the Lowlanders, the yellow-haired people of the Plain were quite unlike them in disposition and intent. They were busy, outgoing and, on occasion, sly. There was no mysterious unvoiced code—they had their robbers and malcontents, and had had their battles, too. Only five years before, the city had been at war with its nearest neighbor. Who knew how many corpses under the soil helped now to nourish the grain?

Raldnor seemed able to speak their tongue fluently. Yannul, by dint of hard labor, began to learn. He learned also, as did Resha, to pull up the hood of his garment when they approached populated areas or passed travelers on the roads. The Plain dwellers did not seem hostile in the least to the strange phenomenon of black hair, but their curiosity and surprise grew irksome. Of their mind speech there was no great evidence. It seemed as if prosperity and worldliness were letting that inner art decay.

They reached the city on the afternoon of the third day: a strong-walled, high-towered pile built on an ancient manmade hill some eighty feet or so above the Plain. It did not have the beauty of a Vis city. There was something crouching and squat about it despite the towers. Vathcri it was called. Various houses and taverns sprawled down the hill and over the Plain beyond its walls, and there were soldiers about in the dark-blue livery they had seen in the towns. Despite this, discipline at the gate was lax. A polite answer to a brief challenge got them through. It was a Justice Day—a day when the king gave public audience, settled disputes and tried offenders in the open-air court before his palace.

“We have such things in Lan,” Yannul said, “and the Am Dorthar call us barbarians.”

The city seemed to rise in terraces toward its citadel, its winding streets clothed with crowds, wine sellers and pickpockets. Resha’s hood slipped away, and an excited babble went up. The girl stared haughtily about and stalked on, the crowd parting to gape at her. Yannul pushed back his own hood at that, and they moved more easily afterward. When they reached the audience place, the press was at its thickest.

“These peasants,” Resha hissed with profound contempt. “What King of Alisaar or Zakoris or Dorthar would demean himself by talking directly to a pack of clods?”

They got down steps and emerged in the bowl of the court. The palace which rose behind it pushed up tall spires, and painted friezes glowed on its red walls. Black shade trees had been planted where the King’s platform stood. The King himself sat in an ivory chair, before him were two kneeling supplicants, all around him the clutter of his court, advisors, clerks and military officers. Something caught Yannul’s eye—the banner held up behind the King’s chair.

“Raldnor,” he said, “do you see—?”

On the light-blue ground, an embroidery of a woman with ice-white skin and golden hair, a woman with eight serpentine arms, her body ending in the coiling rope of a serpent’s tail.

“Is that their King?” Resha asked superfluously.

“I imagine so,” Yannul answered, still staring at the banner.

“And that woman? Would she be his wife?”

Yannul looked again at the platform and saw the reason for her interest. The King was young and very handsome. To his right, a little behind him, half hidden by the drifts of tree shadow, sat a woman in a white robe. About to reply that this was most certainly the King’s favorite and only wife, to whom he had sworn forever to be faithful on pain of inexpressible divine torture, Yannul checked himself, for he saw abruptly that Raldnor was no longer with them. Yannul gazed about him, then swiftly ahead. Even in the blond crowd that salt-white hair was easy to discover.

“By the gods—he’s asking audience of their King.”

Taking Resha by the arm, the Lan pushed his way further forward until he stood at the very fringe of people, looking out across the flagged space at the handsome King. The two supplicants had moved off, one grinning, one sour, as was to be expected. Now a clerk hurried to the King, spoke to him and drew back. The King was frowning. His eyes skimmed over the crowd and found out Raldnor. The King said something. The clerk turned and beckoned.

Raldnor stepped out onto the open space and went forward. There was a burst of exclamations, then total silence. Even in this gathering of racial brothers Raldnor was remarkable. Without seeing his face, Yannul sensed again that incredible, almost physical, emanation of certainty and power.

“Kneel,” the clerk rapped out. In the stillness words carried well.

“In the land I come from,” Raldnor said, “one King does not kneel to another.” His voice was quiet and very level, yet there was not a man there who did not hear it.

The crowd murmured, then became quiet.

“So you claim royal birth,” the King said. “Of what city then are you King? Vardath and Tarabann, I believe, might dispute your rights.”

“There is a land beyond your seas, King. My rights are there.”

The young King smiled.

“Are you a dreamer, I wonder? Or are you mad?”

There was a deeper silence then. Standing behind Raldnor, unable to see his face or his eyes, Yannul nevertheless saw the effect they produced on the King, whose own eyes widened and flinched. His tanned face paled. He snarled through his teeth, midway between shock and anger: “You dare to try magicians’ tricks on me!” And to the clerk in fury: “Who is this man?”

The clerk whispered. The King again looked up; this time he made out Yannul and Resha. The King seemed unnerved. He stared at Raldnor.

“You say you come from another land, a land where there are dark-haired peoples. The man and the woman there—are they your proof?”

“I am my own proof, King. Read my brain. I open it to you.”

The King flinched a second time.

“Such things are for the priests of Ashkar. Do you ask to be examined by them?”

“My lord,” Raldnor said, “my kingdom is a small one. Men there resemble the men of Vathcri. But there is a black-haired tyrant who hates my people simply for their color. Every moment that is wasted between us sees the shadow of their persecution and anguish thrown farther.”

The King gave a violent cry. He leaped from his ivory chair. Guards ran to him. He thrust them aside. Even the white-gowned women started up in the shade.

“Don’t try to breach my mind with your own sick dreams!” the King shouted. The guards now ran to Raldnor; they came thrusting through the press and seized Yannul also, and the girl.

As the blue-liveried soldiers dragged the Lan across the court, he had one last glimpse of the Vathcrian King, and saw the fury and the terror on his face. Behind, the crowd milled in uproar.

The sands of twilight drifted on the floors of the red palace.

Jarred of Vathcri paced through them, up and down before the great hearth. He was a young king, very young. His father had died in early middle life, abruptly, and left him the ivory chair before he was ready for it. He had ruled half a year; now, confronted by the stranger, he saw it had not been enough.

“Who is this man?” he asked again. “Where does he come from?”

The pale-haired girl in the white dress sitting in the light of the one lamp in the room said gently: “Perhaps he is who he says he is, and comes from where he says he does. Shouldn’t you consider that eventuality, my brother?”

“Impossible,” Jarred snapped. Her demure, uncluttered wisdom angered him.

“Why impossible? There’s always been a legend of another land, a land of dark-haired men. And don’t you remember the maps of old Jorahan the Scholar—the sea routes that lead out of Shansar, in the north?”

“He breached my thoughts. In our father’s time that would have earned him death—to dare speak within to a king—and he did more. I couldn’t shut him out. He thrust aside the barriers—mind-spoke me against my will. How many men can do that?”

“Some of the priests,” she said.

“Some of the priests tell us they can,” Jarred sneered. “How many have you known do it?”

She said musingly: “It was said to be the greatest gift that Ashkar gave us—the ability to speak within. Now few of us use it, or could we use it if we wished?”

“You and I, Sulvian,” he said, “since childhood.”

“Oh, you and I. And we talk with our mouths at this very moment. No. Mind speech has become a hindrance to prosperity, because it’s hard to practice dishonesty when your thoughts are accessible, difficult to steal and murder and grow rich. Only the forest people mind-speak now, my brother. She must pity us.”

“Ashkar is honored daily in the temples of this and every other city. I doubt if she objects to that or to the gifts laid on her altars.”

“Who knows,” Sulvian murmured, “what a goddess would prefer to have from us. Our gold or our integrity.”

The door opened. The High Priest of the order of the Vathcrian Ashkar entered—a thin, straight man in the dark robe of his calling, the violet Serpent’s Eye on his breast. He did not bow or in any manner prostrate himself, his status, in certain aesthetic and still recognized ways, being superior to the King’s.

“Well, Melash, you’ve come in time to rescue me from a lecture by my lady sister. She takes her duties as priestess too seriously.”

“I am delighted, King, that she does. We shall need Ashkar’s guidance in the days ahead.”

“What do you mean, Melash?”

“I mean, King, I have just come from questioning the stranger and his two companions as you asked.”

“And?”

“And, my King, he is all he says. And more.”

Jarred’s face whitened.

“You’re mistaken, Melash.”

“No, King, I am not. I discount the insult you render me in doubting my mental capabilities. I understand the stranger breached your mind and made you afraid.”

“Not afraid!” Jarred shouted.

“Yes, my King. No shame in that. He has made me also afraid. He has been very honest with us. He has shown me that before he reached our land, he had neither purpose nor direction; his mind was closed. Now the capacity of his mind is greater than any I have ever encountered or heard spoken of. And his purpose is likely to upset the balance of our world.”

“Well, tell me what he showed you. The whole story. Let’s see if it’s at all credible.”

Melash told him.

“You’re speaking like a fool, Melash,” Jarred cried when he was done. “Have you lost your reason? This is some romance made up in the bazaar.”

“No, King,” Melash said, “but if you are in doubt, you should question him yourself.”

“Then bring him,” Jarred said stonily.

Behind the priest the door immediately opened. The stranger came through, but only his white hair caught the little lamplight. The rest of him was shadow.

“Did you call him with your mind?” Jarred rasped.

“There was no need,” Melash said quietly. “He can read all our minds, whether we permit it or not.”

Jarred felt himself tremble, and stilled it. He retreated into the aura of the lamp, and sat down in the ivory chair, near Sulvian.

“What are you called, outlander?” he demanded in a dry, harsh voice.

“Raldnor, King.”

“Come here then, Raldnor. Where I can see you.”

The priest bowed his head and stood like an effigy, disclaiming without words the actions of his lord.

The stranger moved up the room. The lamp caught his face and his extraordinary eyes. The eyes fixed on Jarred.

“Melash, the High Priest of Ashkar, has told us everything you told him, Raldnor. I must congratulate your vivid and inventive imagination. You’ve missed nothing, even the goddess has been put in, Ashkar, who you claim to worship in this—other country of yours, under another name. Please tell me now what you hope to gain by such a fantastic mishmash?”

“Help for my people,” the stranger said. “I have learned of the other cities of the Plain, their river outlets and their ships. And there is Shansar in the north.”

“Don’t think you can make a fool of all of us,” Jarred spat at him.

Sulvian’s hand gripped suddenly on his arm.

“Listen.”

Outside a wind had risen; it moaned and sawed about the palace towers. Distant shutters banged in an irregular tempo. The priest raised his head. It was the dust wind of the Plains, but not the time for it. The room seemed suddenly full of omens.

Jarred shut his eyes, but already he saw, and the inner darkness was alive with pictures. He witnessed the smoking ruins, the slaves driven through the snow in chains and the wind blew among the yellow hair of the dead. It came too fast, he could not contain it. There was a black-haired man, with burning madman’s eyes—a man composed of hate and the desires of hate.

Beyond the palace walls the dust wind scoured down the winding streets of Vathcri. Men muttered, children woke and screamed in fright, women hurried to the temples. In the great pillared place of Ashkar, where it overlooked the sacred groves below, the serpents hissed and thrashed in their pit. A gust blew wide the shutters and doused the lamps on the altar. A cry of superstitious terror arose, and sleeping birds clouded up from their sanctuaries on the temple roofs.

Sulvian left her chair.

The lamp had smoked and flickered out, but in the darkness she could somehow find her way. She glimpsed Jarred huddled on the ivory seat and the gray-faced priest. But she saw the stranger, as clearly as if the lamp still burned, not on him but from inside his flesh, behind his eyes.

“You trap our city in a vise of fear,” she said. “Let go.”

“You trap yourselves,” he answered. “Are you afraid, Sulvian, priestess of Ashkar Anackire?”

“No,” she whispered. Then: “Yes. I saw myself dead in your mind. The Black King had killed me.”

“Not you,” he said, “though she resembled you.”

She saw herself abruptly in his brain; he showed her herself as he saw her: pale as pure light, her hair as white as his, yet blown by the wind into a tinsel of ice.

“Anici—” she said. “But there is another—”

“No longer,” he said. “Amrek, the Black King, has caused both their deaths.”

“You must hate him a great deal,” she whispered.

“I pity him.”

She heard the terrible power behind his voice, the thing so invincible that it could pity the enemy it would destroy.

“Did you call the wind?” she asked him.

“No. I am not a magician of Shansar.”

“But the wind came.”

“Yes, Sulvian. It came.”

“Jarred . . .” she said. “By the laws of the cities, you’ve challenged his rule as King.”

He said nothing.

Beyond the windows, the wind fell suddenly quiet. The horn of a gold moon pierced the tangled clouds.

In Tarabann of the Rock the wind came funneling from the southwest. Priests, as they stood on the high prayer-towers of Ashkar—raised up and built to resemble striking serpents—saw the wind coming like a long-tailed cloud, itself a python made of dust and storm.

It smote on Tarabann for two days and a night between. That night’s moon was dark blue as sapphire, the days’ sun the color of old blood. The waves reared up and flooded the salty flats that stretched out two miles from the Rock to the sea. Ships were wrecked and roofs blown off. The priests had different prayers to attend to. They smoked their incense and laid bare their minds, and became troubled. On the day after the wind dropped, the High Priest of Ashkar of the Rock came to Klar.

“It seems, lord, there is a new King in Vathcri.”

Klar, who was the King of Tarabann, who had fought at his father’s side in the last battle with Vathcri five years before, put down his gilded book.

“A new King, you say? What’s become of the young pup, Jarred?”

“He lives, King. You must understand that thought and things of the mind are as mist—we comprehend as best we may—”

“So you fumble at your tasks. I understand very well.”

“Indeed, King, you do not. There is a—power—in Vathcri. I have no other means to explain what I have felt. A vast power. Greater than the King’s. Not, I would judge, the power of a man. It has to do with the wind, yet is dissociated from the wind.”

“Riddles,” Klar snapped, snapping, too, the clasps of his book.

“Once gods walked on earth, King. So our fables tell us. Once She talked with men, like a kind sister.”

“You’re trying to say there’s a god walking about in Vathcri?”

“I would not pledge myself so far, lord, as to say such a thing.”

Klar was wary of the magic of the priests. He was two things: one was mostly merchant, the other all soldier, and neither had time for mysticism. The inner tongue had been dead in him since his brother—the only man with whom he could so speak—fell in the siege of a Vathcrian town. Nevertheless, he respected the priests, though he did not like their business to overlap into his own forthright and uncomplex world.

“Very well, sir,” he said, “I’ll send people to Vathcri. We’ll see what’s up, eh, old priest? Don’t fret. You did well to tell me.”

But Klar’s men were only away two days. On the third day they returned, and with them the six Vathcrians they had met on the road. They had a curious look about them, these Vathcrians. Klar could not gauge it. They brought a message not from the king, Jarred, though it bore his seal. Klar read it and looked up amazed.

“There is a man here, commits himself to paper, calls me brother in the manner of a king and bids me come inland to assembly in the Place of Kings at Pellea.”

“King,” the chief Vathcrian said, “that is the old place of assembly, used by our ancestors.”

“So it is, precisely,” Klar said, “but our ancestors, and not since. The last meeting there was a hundred, a hundred and fifty years past. By Ashkar! And is the rest of this correct: I must decide, along with the other Kings, whether or not to go to the aid of this Lowland country, never before heard of or seen?”

“Yes, King. Lord Jarred has sent men also to Vardath, and up into Shansar.”

“By Ashkar. I thought it was this Raldnor sent you, not Jarred.”

“They’re bound as brothers,” the Vathcrian said. “Raldnor also is royal, son of a High King and a priestess.” He did not look abashed, but rather, proud.

“Well, well,” Klar said. “Well, well.”

To blue-walled Vardath the wind came only for a night, stirring up the fishing boats on her broad river. A tree fell in the King’s garden. It had been planted at the hour of his birth, and the omen alarmed him. His wife, Ezlian, High Priestess of the Vardish Ashkar, went herself to the goddess, and returned to him in the dawn, pale, but smiling in a certain way she had.

“Rest easy, Sorm my husband. The omen was not your death.”

“What then, for Ashkar’s sake?”

“There’s change coming. The wind brought it. We must neither resist nor sorrow; both are superfluous and quite futile.”

“Change for the worse?”

“Simply change,” she said and kissed his face.

Sorm loved his wife and trusted her. He was neither weak nor unmasculine, yet in things spiritual, he leaned on her. From a child she had possessed aptitude and could speak within to most who were willing. In adolescence she had gone to live a year with the forest people, since when she had eaten no meat and shown particular cleverness in healing, both physical and of the mind. He himself had seen her somehow communing with a lion in the yellow hills above Vardath, while drawn knife in hand he trembled in every limb with terror for her. The snakes in the temple pit she called her children, and they wound like bracelets round her wrists and throat, and snuggled in her hair.

The Vathcrian riders came ten days after the tree fell.

Sorm asked, as others had similarly been moved to ask: “Who is this man?”

Ezlian seemed puzzled, searching inside herself. Presently she said: “There is a Vardish fable of a man born of a serpent, a hero. His name was Raldanash. He had dark skin, pale hair. The legend says his eyes were like Her eyes.”

“Yes, priestess,” the Vathcrian said, using the title generally considered to be more important than queen, “this man is dark, and very fair. His eyes burn.”

“Is he then some sort of god?” Sorm said, his mouth dry as ash.

“We must go to Pellea and find out,” said Ezlian. Then smiling in her way, she added: “But naturally, it’s as my lord wishes.”

In Shansar no wind came.

Mountains divided it from the fertile plains and forests of the south, and mountains thrust up inside it. There was a great deal of water in Shansar; it was a land of rivers and lakes and marsh, with the great rock stacks and steeples jutting in marching lines across it, like jagged stepping stones discarded by giants. It had a hundred or more outlets to the sea. Jorahan, the Vathcrian scholar, who had lived out his old age in a little-known town of the south, had left maps to show these mostly unused ways. There were many kings in Shansar and many tribes. They built ships of necessity. Sometimes they sailed around the coasts to pirate in the south. They worshiped magic, but with them also only their holy men spoke within—or lovers, or families. They had a goddess. Her name was Ashara. She had a fish’s tail, and her arms were eight white cilia such as they occasionally discovered on lake creatures.

Three Vathcrians, one of whom was a guide, rode into the mountains, crossed an ancient pass, came down into Shansar and bartered for a long narrow boat. There was a fourth man with them, not a Vathcrian, a tall man with white hair. They deferred to him as to a king, but he had come to be his own messenger in these lands that answered to no call from the south. There was a hosting place here, too; Jorahan had marked it on his maps. It also had been unused for centuries; only tradition and superstition had seen to its upkeep.

They rowed up great stretches of pearly water, the stranger-king taking his turn with the Vathcrians under skies purple with heat. In villages, women washing clothes stared at their southern garments. Men challenged them.

“I am making for Ashara’s Breast,” the white-haired man told them. That was their name for the old meeting place. They let him go. They had certain antique ritualistic truce laws concerning men who sought Ashara’s Breast. Besides, the warriors who spoke to the white-haired one became convinced that he had reason and purpose. Long boats began to trail a mile or so behind the Vathcrian canoe, not in hostility but mainly out of a desire to witness whatever the white-haired man intended to do.

They reached the place at evening and climbed up its shaggy, moss-grown steeps. Despite its name, it was in no way like a breast, either of woman or goddess. Near the summit stood a ramshackle priests’ dwelling, which housed five or six old priests, stiff in their joints, yet with fierce, dangerous eyes for visitors. One stood in the path of the white-haired man. He held out his staff, then threw it down at the man’s feet. The staff convulsed and became a black serpent. The Vathcrians jumped back, cursing; the Shansarians, who had moved up the mount after them, made signs of religion and magic.

Raldnor looked in the old priest’s face. He said very quietly: “Is the child afraid of the limbs that bore him?”

He reached and took up the serpent, which sprang instantly straight in his hands. He held out to the priest a staff. The old man’s eyes watered. He said: “Do you claim, outlander, to be Her son?”

“How does a man reckon such things?” Raldnor said, looking into the old priest’s eyes. “It would be fairer to say my mother was Her daughter.”

“You blaspheme,” the priest said. He trembled. Then he shut his eyes and tottered. Raldnor gently took his arm to steady him.

“Now you know me,” Raldnor said.

The old priest whispered: “I have seen into his mind. He must have his way, whatever it is to be.”

A murmur went up, like the wind stirring.

“There is a beacon here which summons the kings of Shansar,” Raldnor said. “I have come to light it.”

They led him up to the top of the mount. There was a vast crater there, and in the crater one tall dead tree. None of them knew who had planted it; certainly it had lived long, before death. Its white wasted branches seemed to reach into the apex of the sky. Raldnor struck fire and let the fire have the tree. The flames ran up and up, springing out on the bony boughs. It appeared that the tree was abruptly, miraculously living and in scarlet blossom. Men muttered and fell silent. There had been a legend in Shansar of a change which would alter the world when a dead tree bore red flower.

Night came on, and the tree burned like a red spear dividing the night.

Then, the wind rose.

It blew in black and scarlet gusts. The smoke and the colored sparks filled the sky. For uncountable miles the beacon showed; for uncountable miles they smelled the smoke on the wind.

It was too ancient a sign, too magical a sign for a land that worshiped magic to ignore. Tribe spoke to tribe, forgetting feuds or caste. Kings met up in the barren black rocklands, or in the watery dawn of the lakes. They gathered, and they came toward the ancient place, toward the magnet of the burning tree. For a night which would see the firing of the tree in Ashara’s Breast had been itself a myth and a prophecy.

“How will he speak to them? What will he say?”

It was the third night on Ashara’s Breast. The three Vathcrians sat at their own separate fire, a little down the mount from the priests’ house. There were many fires on the mount that night, and below the mount fires spread out like a million ruby eyes across the dark plateau. Above, the tree still smoked. It had proved good timber.

“How many have come?” the Vathcrian asked again.

“She knows,” another answered. “Half the kings of Shansar, at least, and more on the river road, Url says. As to what he’ll say—he’s a King, and more than that. By Ashkar, I’d fight for him. It’s a fever in me; why, I don’t know. You feel it too, all Vathcri felt it before he was done with us. It’s a fever. They’ll all catch it, those tribal men down there.”

“I love him,” a man said.

Another man laughed and said something witty and crude, poking at the fire.

“No, not love that sits in the crotch, you damned midden-brain. Like love of the land, of the place you were born in, the thing you ache to get back to, the thing you’d fight to hold, die for your sons to keep it.”

“Ah, you romantic. No, it isn’t love I feel. But he wants justice—only that. And he’s a King’s son, yet hell take his turn with us in the mountains or on the boat—I value that in a man. He can lend his hand, yet lose nothing of what he is. The old Kings were like that Besides—this land of black-haired men is rich and ripe for the taking, I’d say. They’ll see that too, those pirates below.”

Later, they rolled themselves in their blankets to sleep.

In the yellow dawn the priests burned incense. The kings came, powerful savage men, each with his two or three personal bodyguards, his eldest son, his magician. They crowded down into the crater, packed together. It was a good place for treachery, but here was no treachery; their laws had no room for it at such a time. The tree was almost done smoking.

Raldnor spoke to them; his voice carried to the edges of the crater, yet the voice was not merely in their ears. It spoke to each of them in their brains. They grew uneasy; the magicians chanted and made passes in the air. There was a humming of chants, like bees.

Then a silence came—gradually, a little at a time. There was a surge, like water bursting from the ground, swelling, filling the crater, spilling down the slope, to take in the rock, the plateau beneath. First one man, then another. Each had a chink, a crack in the adamantine crust which had submerged his mind. Each felt invasion at that chink, that crack, yet it came too swift for any fear. They felt in those moments neither greed nor pity, for he eclipsed their thoughts with his own. He made them, for those moments, himself. They saw his ambitions and his aims, his anguish, his passion and his power—all as if they had been their own. They felt grief and anger and great purpose. Then it was gone, fading like the color from the sky, like moisture in the heat.

There was talk and superstition after. They shouted among themselves and set their sorcerers to work. But the storm had come and gone. They provided an aftermath with no meaning.

“How can one man communicate with so many merely by use of his brain?” The Vathcrian, who had spoken of the pickings of Vis land, wondered, hushed, “Is he then a god? Look at them argue.”

“Let them. Their decision’s made. He made it. Beasts that run to the sea to drown themselves may discuss what they’re doing on the way, but the sea still has them.”

In the sanctuary the old priest sat with his serpent staff across his knees. He too, with all the rest, had felt the solitary brain command his own. But with his inner knowledge and the harsh training of his calling, he had seen, too, into the depths of Raldnor, known the past, the desolation, guilt and pain, now set aside forever, but marked indelibly, like deep scars.

“We ask: is he a god, that man?” the priest thought. “But lie is no longer anything we know to put a name to. He has found his soul but lost his self. Raldnor, or Raldanash in the myth. He said his mother was Her child—Yes, I saw her. She had Her face. And his Lowland race I saw so clearly in my mind when he conjured them. Across great seas, yet they worship Her—How can this be? A strange race, asleep now, but he will wake them. And he is theirs, an emanation of his people. No longer a man, but a collective being. Yes, that is what he is. Not king or god, but essence, expression.”

The staff twitched in his hands. He smiled but not enough to stretch his narrow mouth. He had practiced the illusion so often that now it seemed sealed in the wood. The staff believed itself a snake. This was how he explained the phenomenon.

Outside, the day gathered itself and fell away. He sensed them alter course and begin to persuade themselves to the direction they had already had chosen for them.

“But whatever he is, have we ever known such power?” the priest thought. “How can we contain it? At some time the fight will finish. Will he simply burn away then, like the magic tree? What then can turn him back into a man?”

Summer was descending from its golden summit at Pellea when the three kings came there with their households, and the lords of their holdings and their towns. They came for their several reasons, with their several curiosities, fears and impatience. They spoke with Jarred, and stared at the dark-haired man and the dark-haired women walking in their elegant Vathcrian clothes. It seemed the stranger, Raldnor, had taken his demands to barbaric Shansar, and had been gone two months of the Vathcrian calendar.

“You’ve lost him,” Klar said. “The sorcerers have eaten him up, and good riddance.”

Yet Jarred was not the youngster he recalled; here was poise now, and calm, alongside the good looks. Klar noticed, too, how Sulvian was.

“She fancies the stranger-King, whoever he is,” Klar mused. “She’ll cry if he doesn’t come back.”

Klar had been at Pellea two days when the sentries rode down from the hills. They had seen riders on the upper passes—Vathcrian livery and arms, a white-haired man at their head, at back some two hundred Shansars on skinny marsh horses. Klar concluded the stranger was bringing down an enemy force to overwhelm the civilized men of the south. He called for action, but got only one. Ezlian of Vardath laughed at him—not rudely but affectionately, which was worse. He dragged his own few men into shape. When the force appeared on the Pellean plain four days later, he rode out and challenged them. And then his skull seemed full of things—bright, amorphous, pleasing things. It was like some drug. Klar was reminded irresistibly of that brother he had mind-spoken with, and grit tormented his eyes. He pushed emotion from him and stared at the stranger.

“I see you’re all they said. You were well suited where you went—the land of magicians. And you’ve brought your brothers with you, by Ashkar.”

But he rode with Raldnor, side by side, into Pellea. Something had touched him, touched him in a deep way, yet he was soothed.

The assembly was formed in the morning.

The five Shansarian Kings who had come with Raldnor from the lakes sat ranked behind him, grim-faced. It was clear they had assumed their stand already. The Vathcrians had spoken of a vast communion, mind with mind, on the beacon place of Shansar, but if any were alarmed or welcomed that here, it did not come. Raldnor spoke to them as a prince, cleverly, and fairly. He made them see what was to be gained—but also what might be lost if ever men of the dark races found them, men more willing to make war than they.

“Not so much a mystic as you hoped,” Klar said, “eh, Lady Ezlian?”

“We have already had our omens,” she said. She had spoken with Raldnor a long while as they walked with Sulvian in the old ruined gardens of Pellea’s crumbling palace. Snakes and vermin had lurked everywhere, Klar supposed, but that would hardly have troubled those three.

At dusk the torches in the ancient hall were lit. Light flared on hollow eyes and silent faces.

“What you ask, Raldnor of Vis, is immeasurable,” Sorm of Vardath said. “Not merely in terms of battle or of supremacy. I ask you only what we lose when we bow utterly to you?”

Ezlian rose. She lightly placed her hand on Sorm’s shoulder.

“If you are to lose anything, my lord, then it’s already lost.”

Jarred also rose.

“I put my force of arms at disposal of your will, Raldnor, King. I pledge you here and now that your battle is mine.”

Sorm said: “This woman at my side speaks for me. Count me your captain, Raldnor, King.”

Klar glanced about. He caught suddenly the dark eye of the black-haired man seated at Raldnor’s right hand, the one they called Yannul.

“You,” Klar bawled, “what’ve you to say when this fellow traveler of yours takes us off to pillage your racial kin?”

“My sword arm is Raldnor’s,” the man said, “as will be the sword arms of several of my countrymen. None of us are kin to the Dortharians.”

“Then, damn you,” Klar said, “I’ll take my chance with the rest of you. That’s the best omen of all when wolf eats wolf and swears it’s jackal.”

In the dark Sulvian walked about the garden, where fireflies reflected in the stagnant pools. Beside a broken urn she paused, sensing the quiver in her thoughts, then turned and saw Jarred.

“You shouldn’t roam about unescorted,” he said.

“Oh, here it all seems very safe. So old and so peaceful. I’m glad that you spoke first with your mind to me.”

“I’m rusty. It will improve, I expect. Klar’s still planning his campaign with Urgil of Shansar, discussing Jorahan’s sea routes. The lower halls are in uproar. It seems they like each other because they can both hold their beer. We must start the levies. Odd that our men will fight so willingly.”

“You understand why,” she said.

“And you,” he said, “are you happy, my sister?”

“Happy?” The intermittent fireflies spangled her hair. “Happy, do you mean, because I shall be betrothed to him, married to him to seal the alliance between his land and ours? Happy, perhaps, that I resemble a woman he once loved?” Jarred was silent. She said: “Oh, I know he will be kind to me. I know he will give me pleasure—that I shall bear his child. Somehow I see all this. I see, too, that he can’t love me. It would be impossible. He is beyond love. I shall be the wife of a demon, as if in a story.”

“But,” Jarred said, “you love him.”

“Yes. Of course. I shall never love anyone else now. He made me into that other woman—Anici. He reincarnated her in my flesh. It wasn’t intended; it simply happened when I saw myself in his mind.”

“This is absurd,” Jarred said. “We’ll let go this match for Vathcri. Let him have one of Sorm’s daughters.”

“A child of eight years? No. He must leave his seed here in this land when he leaves it. I think that he will never come back. No, Jarred. I want to bear his child. It’s something, if not very much. Oh, this land,” she said. “She made us the last part of his journey—only a fragment, a means.”

The moon emerged, rising out of the foliage of a tree and opened the garden to its light.

“There’s something harsh in moonlight,” Sulvian said. “It scours every shadow. Jarred, when this is over, will we still remain, or will the harsh light scour us away?”

A night bird began to sing somewhere among the overgrowth and ruined terraces. After this, silence hung on Pellea. And on the beaches of the wide lands, south and north, only the sea was moving.