The White Serpent

14 A Moiyan Wedding

Unlike the nuptuals of most of Vis, the marriages of Lowlanders were not concerned with the Red Star. It was well-known, Vis over, the Plains Race was immune to Zatis. For the mixed blood, and the Dortharians, Xarabs, and others who interwed on the Plains, they did not seem to mind too much not waiting on into the hot months. The first of summer, after the rains, before the deluge of the heat, that was the favored time, in the southern south.

In the province of Moih, the dual city-state of coastal Moiyah and the inland metropolis of Hibrel, a thriving culture had for some sixty years been growing up. Giving fealty direct to the Storm Lords of Dorthar, the cities and towns of Moih were democratically governed by their elected councils, enriched by their merchant fleets and traders’ guilds, tolerant in the extreme of all gods, while cleaving themselves proudly always to Anackire, Lady of Snakes. There was neither racial, religious nor class stricture in the mores and legalities of Moih. Theoretically, there, you might befriend and worship whom you chose, and rise to whatever position you were capable of. Out of the melting pot of persecution, off the anvil of two famous wars, Moih had emerged, splitting herself free of the Lowland Way. Not for her the passive and unorganized fatalism still current in the southernmost Plains. Nor the xenophobia of the purist Amanackire, one of whose strongholds, the city of Hamos, lay four days’ ride from Hibrel’s outskirt, behind a barricade of ethnic ice. Correspondingly, as the frigid zealots had gathered to their own, into bustling Moih flocked the makers and doers of the Lowland people, along with representatives of almost every Vis-Plains mixture possible.

The wedding customs of Moih, therefore, tended somewhat to variety.

Upon this, one particular bridegroom was not pondering, late in the day in Moiyah.

Attired like a peacock for the event, it was nevertheless obvious that the good-looking young man was himself no son of the Plains. His hair and eyes were blackest black, his skin boldly metallic. Indeed, against the darkness of him, his Moiyan marriage clothes of white and gilt looked especially well.

She had seen him in something less elegant, the first time.

The bridegroom smiled. He was-exhilarated, and a very little nervous, for this sunset’s rituals were alien, and he meant to present them faultlessly. For her sake, of course.

If it came to that, what had he thought of her, at the first sighting? He had been half-blinded still by what had led up to it, and coming into the bay of Moiyah, among all the creamy shipping, the painted walls above with the golden Anackire perched there, and then beholding the flaxen throng in the port—he felt a sort of fear or disgust. Xenophobia was his portion, too. The ship had been difficult enough. Something in him was starving for the multitudes of his own kind—And in and out of the jostling crowd along the quayside, had come the two daughters of Arn Yr, with their maid.

Annah, the elder, was also the taller of the two, with a dainty porcelain head bound and wound with hair like ripened wheat. News had already run east, of the Aarl-mouth, the great wave, and their outflanking tempests. There had been unearthly dawns and sunfalls, too, at Moiyah. Arn’s ship. Pretty Girl, was anxiously looked for. Getting word from the agent that she was approaching the bay, his daughters hurried down to make sure of their father. But Elissi had seen the ship-lord first. Arn himself, enthusiastically waving in return, pointed out both girls to his passengers.

Elissi was slight and small, fair-skinned but summer tanned. Her hair was so light that the sunshine sent it up like a scarf of white fire. But she had remembered her Ommish granddam. Elissi’s eyes, like the eyes of Ommos, and of Ahsaar, and of Corhl, were jets.

Maybe Chacor had been consoled by her black eyes. When, later, he came to look into them.

He had meant to go away quickly. Up into Zarabiss, to Dorthar, or to the homeland, like a frightened dog. The kindness and the openheartedness of Moih he accepted, and was prepared to repay if he could, like provisions bought on credit. He knew these people were alive, had characters and minds, even souls perhaps, as he did. But they were nevertheless dream-people.

Of the daunting telepathy of the Plains there was not much overt evidence. The Amanackire prided themselves on their secret inner speaking, but in the mercantile peoples of Moih the art had been restricted, from craft, or common politeness, more to the family circle. On Pretty Girl they had seemed to take care not to bother their Vis passengers with displays of minds in dialogue. In Arn Yr’s house, though it was sometimes apparent a thought had passed between the kindred, they saved their wordless discussions for the private rooms.

However, out in the city, mind speech was sometimes observable. More often, and worse, with the very children playing in the public gardens, their delighted shrieks suddenly stilled as they stood together in complete dumbness, planning the next stage of their game.

As for those Vis Chacor saw on the streets—a handful of Lans, amiable Dortharians in from the fort up the coast, Xarabian merchants, one Elyrian astrologer in a shop near the quay—even Annah’s betrothed, a mix so nearly Vis in looks it came as a jolt to hear his Vathcrian twang—they only disconcerted Chacor, put him out. There were not enough of them. It was foolish to be there at all.

Arn Yr’s unfailing charity and humor had been evident on the ship. The vessel had got a battering and enough cargo had been lost she must go home without profit to repair, but he had not bemoaned misfortune, and once in port spent less time with his agents than in showing Chacor the city. Chacor had long since found Rehger valueless as a companion. There was an Arms Academy at Moiyah. Rising early, Rehger would be gone, to utilize the services of the gymnasium. He sold the gold on his wrists and off his beh to pay, and to recompense Arn Yr, who, with his wife, had made such a fuss of refusal it developed into a one-sided row—Chacor had scarcely any money and nothing to sell, apart from himself. But to take work in Moiyah seemed to imply remaining in Moiyah, and he did not want to do it. No one gave cash to see acrobatic street brawls, and most of the bets in Moih inclined to archery contests and Shansar horse-races. On the fifth day Arn Yr, who had shown Chacor the markets and the guild halls, the exterior of the gold-roofed Anackire temple and the race-track, led him into Moiyah’s Street of Gods.

Chacor looked about in earnest dismay, seeing represented on every side, among the groves of yellow-flowered sintal trees, most of the foremost deities of Vis. There the temple of the Ommish fire god, cheek by jowl with his brother of Zakoris, and there the pavilion of the Xarabian Yasmis, furled with incense. Farther along, obsidian dragons marked a shrine to Dorthar’s mysterious storm gods, where two or three Dortharian soldiers were playing dice familiarly on the steps. Even Rom, blue-bearded, loomed on a plinth.

Chacor muttered. He asked Arn Yr, if the Lowlanders were so devout, so given to Anack, why this sacrilege under her nose. Arn Yr explained the ethics of tolerance. He himself did not neglect Zarok.

“Then,” said Chacor, “where is Corrah?”

Arn Yr, who had possibly been waiting for this, indicated a lane. Unconvinced the Corhlan turned into it, and soon found the house of Corrah, and the house of Cah, neighboring each other. He went in at the Corhlish entrance, and gave one of his last coins to make an offering of balm, had no comfort, wanted to ask the goddess what she was doing there.

That evening, Rehger achieved gainful employment in Moih. The ship lord’s domicile, partial to dinner parties, had given one. Loath and uneasy you might be, but you found yourself nonetheless in yet more borrowed garments, spruce and garlanded, at a snowy-draped, belilied table with the family, and eight of its intimates. Nor were you churlish, but did your best to behave for your generous hosts. For some reason it was very bright before Chacor, the image of Arn Yr’s ship emerging from the bloody fog beyond Saardsinmey’s shore, (only, quite incredibly, a month ago.) Who had Arn Yr been that day, coming toward them over the ruin of the beach, the red froth of the fouled black sea about his boots? And the blond men of his crew, shaking their heads, giving wine, going into the wreck of the city . . . returning silent in the scarlet dawn that seemed ready never to conclude—A man, Arn Yr, and other men, fellow humans in the world’s night.

To Chacor’s left, the younger daughter, Elissi, offered a segment of candied citrus to a late arrival, an impeccable small silver monkey. Eating graciously, the monkey reviewed the table with indigo eyes.

“Ah, the monkey-princess,” said the man seated on the left hand of Arn Yr’s wife. “I hope she is well?”

The monkey twittered.

The man said, “Alas. She tells me she’s had something of a cough this summer. But how is it now, my dear?”

The monkey flirted, taking her tail in her hands and veiling with it her lower countenance.

“She says, she supposes if she were not treated so uncaringly, she would do better.”

There was some laughter.

“How cruel,” said Elissi now to the princess. “To say such untruths, and before everybody, you ungrateful, furry thing. Besides, you ate the pearl out of my earring. That was the cause of your cough!”

The man who had spoken for the monkey, previously introduced as Master Vanek, was himself a small, grisled individual, of the Guild of Artisans and Stone-Workers. He commented now that the pearl-eater was a paragon, and outlined the vices of another of her tribe, taken to his studio on Marble Street for the purpose of being drawn, who ate her cage bars, and thereafter a bar of casting wax, some sticks of paint, and a wig from the store room.

Then, turning eyes on Rehger, who sat opposite to him, Vanek added, “But it’s a fact, we are always in need of sound models.”

Rehger smiled gravely.

“I won’t boast,” said Vanek, “as the boaster always will say. But the three sons of a lesser Dortharian prince have modeled for my sculptors. It’s well known.”

“The frieze of the warriors on the great library,” said Arn Yr. “Yes, everyone knows. They, too, boasted about it. Your studio’s reputed.”

“My father,” said Vanek to Rehger, “was a herder on the plains under Hibrel. We do what we like here, what we’re good at. This is a virtue of Moih. Nor is any man ashamed to tell another his price.” Vanek took a grape and toyed with it. “We are about to engage on an epic venture: A Raldnor, a statue of the hero-god. It’s commissioned in Xarabiss, for the king’s own winter palace. We must not go wrong, you will agree.” Another pause, and anyone who did not guess what was up, unless it were the monkey, must be the biggest fool in the south. “Well, now, I promise to you, Rehger Am Alisaar, sixty ankars in gold, Moih-Xarabiss guild-weight, if you’ll take on the job.”

The amount, which was impressive, caused a hush.

Then Rehger said, presumably playfully, “Do you mean, sir, the job of sculpting it or of modeling for it?”

The table laughed again. Vanek only looked crafty, intrigued. “To sculpt would bring rather more, but my man already has the commission. I meant, to model.”

And then, another diversion. Rehger said, gently:

“But I heard the face of the messiah-king Raldnor is commemorated. I’m not like him, surely.”

“That may be a subject for debate. The likenesses we have vary, as do the likenesses of his ancestor, Rarnammon, and even of Raldnor’s son, the second Rarnammon, though he’s only dead some twenty-five years. I don’t mean to embarrass you, young man, but great handsomeness is required, of physiognomy and of body. And some endurance also, the stance and the hours are not easy. You were a gladiator in Alisaar, I believe.”

“I was a slave there,” said Rehger.

Vanek said, briskly now, “Moih doesn’t recognize slavery. Any slave who can gain our borders is reckoned a free man, as are all men in the sight of the goddess. Aside from that, do you accept?”

“Yes,” said Rehger. “And my thanks.”

“Thank me when we’re done. And now, Elissi, let me embrace the monkey-princess. I must be going, Arn my friend, ladies, pardon me. You know my routine. The studio begins labor at first light, Rehger.”

Rehger nodded. His face, as his voice, had not changed.

Annah and her Vis-Vathcrian were discreetly canoodling in the vine arbor, and so Chacor cut down the other garden path through the sintal trees.

Rehger was sitting beside the water tank. The moon had risen, and the fish in the tank, by day golden as Lowland eyes, were rising to the surface to see it.

Enclosing the garden’s stillness was the breathing lull of a late city night. The dark beyond the walls was sparingly patched with glowing windows. Now and then a strain of music might be sounded, or mellow voices on the streets below. Sometimes even there rose the murmur of the sea. It was not an hour or a spot for altercation. And, despite any likenesses, it was not Saardsinmey. “So, you’re to stay here and be a Moiyan.” Rehger looked up, and another fish broke the moon on the tank, or it might have been this time one of the sintal flowers, falling down there. “Vanek’s proposal meets a need, I think.” “And was arranged beforehand, I think.” “Yes,” said Rehger. “As we’ve noticed, Arn Yr’s a generous man.”

They had conversed, the Lydian and the Corhl, only rarely on the ship. It was not that Rehger pushed him off, avoided him—it was that Rehger gave him attention—yet did not seek any response in turn. There was none of the comradeship of survival that Chacor anticipated. Rehger did not confide. He listened and replied, and was often alone. And as they went away perforce to the pale shores of the foreigners’ country, Chacor missed, and wanted, something. He had, from the beginning, wanted something of Rehger. To best him, or be bested. To vaunt, to copy, the polish of abrasion. Events had made them reluctant sharers, or—she had done so.

They had walked, each of them, behind her bier. They had taken shelter in her tomb. Together they had escaped.

Chacor said suddenly, “Was it true?”

Rehger did not say What do you mean? He seemed only to consider how the fish rose and the flowers fell, and the moon, breaking and reforming, shattered and born. Then: “I believed I’d killed you. That horrified me. I’d never killed in that way. You know why it happened? It occurred to me you saw.”

“The Anack priest-trick, sword to snake.” (Something else hers, shared.)

Chacor leaned on a tree. It no longer seemed to be anything to do with him, the death-blow, the healing. Could his indifference be sane, or wise? Better to suppose, maybe, his memory was at fault. When he spoke of it, it was as if he forced himself to do it, not in terror, but out of courtesy to some nameless element of his physical personality, or some aspect of his goddess. (He should make Corrah a decent offering. If anyone had saved him, it was Corrah.) After all, the Amanackire had died herself.

As though there had been some clamor, now stillness returned, the living stillness of garden and night. In the vine arbor, if they spoke, it was without any words.

“Before she died,” Rehger said, “Aztira told me I’d meet my father in Moih. When the time came due. I’ve never known my father. For several reasons, I’m curious about him.”

Because Rehger had not said previously What do you mean? Chacor, now, did not blurt out, Oh, was that how she was called—the Lowland witch—Aztira?

“Would she be accurate about a thing like that?”

“I think so.”

They had been lovers (Something not shared.)

“I intend,” said Chacor, “to go north. Xarabiss sounds a likely venue. Or Dorthar. I gather Ommos stinks. But I regret I’m in his debt, our ship lord.”

“I don’t imagine Arn’s much of a man for keeping tally of debts.”

A fish, larger than the rest, leapt through the reflection of the moon. The continual breaking of the light ... It was destroyed, it could not be destroyed.

“Well, I’ll look for your Raldnor statue, coming into Xarabiss, on a car of gold, with trumpets,” said Chacor.

Walking along Amber Street half an hour later, Chacor heard a wolfish step pacing to catch up to him. You did not expect footpads in Moiyah, but that was not to say they were absent. Chacor, knife most ready, turned about and found Annah’s betrothed on his heels.

“You handle yourself like a fighter,” said the latter. “Not ready for sleep? Listen, excuse my frankness, but do you want a girl? There’s a very appealing house I can recommend. They used to know me there, before I cast myself at Annah’s feet. Quite a few of the officers go there. The girls are mostly Xarabians; winsome. Don’t worry about money. I can cover that.”

“Why?” said Chacor belligerently.

Annah’s betrothed shrugged. “Why not? I’m happy tonight.”

His proper name was Jerish. He was the captain of one hundred men of the Moiyah garrison. The curl in his accent came from his father’s being a Vathcrian, and the tongue of the other continent the first language at home. He had once observed in Chacor’s hearing that his father accused him of speaking his Vathcrian conversely in the accents of Vis.

“You know what’s wrong with your Moiyan city?” said Chacor.

“No, what?”

“You give too much.”

They began to stroll northwest, into the streets behind the race-track. Moiyah was never dark, painted all over and well-lit at night by street lamps. Where they burned closest to the sintal trees, with which every park and garden of the city seemed planted, a warm fragrance wafted out that filled the avenues.

“My pack are starting for the fort in two days. You could travel with us if you want. Save you the chance of robbers on the border.”

“And if I like, you’ll help me get into the army, which is always in need of fit and healthy men, regardless of race or religion.”

“That’s true. I tell you, we still get reavers on our bit of sea. And we like to show New Alisaar fair will and a firm face.”

“But as luck has it, you can now forget Saardsinmey.”

They parted near the cattle market, from which a faint shifting and lowing mocked Chacor as he strode off.

Passing back again by the race-track, he took unfriendly note of tomorrow’s races pinned up on the gate.

Even Anack gave.

At noon the next day, plunged from a sleepless bed, he had put put the ultimate scrap of his financial hide upon a black Shansar racer, and won twenty silver parings, Moih rate.

Then when he reached the Corrah temple, he saw Elissi passing in under the porch and petrified, thinking he had gone mad.

But no, there was the little maid against a pillar, rocking the pet monkey like a baby.

Chacor stationed himself in the doorway of the shrine opposite, and waited, in a bemused fury. After perhaps the third of an hour, Elissi came out of the temple. There was a brilliant flush in the clear honey of her cheeks which, as Chacor arrived in her path, faded into pallor.

“What were you doing in there?” said Chacor. When

Elissi only stared at him, he said, “Do you go there regularly, you pious ones, to spit on the altar?”

“No.”

“What then?”

Elissi ran suddenly from guilty shame to annoyance.

“What do you think? To make an offering.”

“What? The worshiper of Anack the Serpent goes to the dirt-heap of the unbeliever to offer?” (He had chosen to forget Arn and the fire god.) In her face then he saw a struggle to be serene, as when dealing with an irrational, fractious child. This caused him to burst out loudly, “And won’t the snake woman enviously strike at you for it?”

People turned to glance their way, good-humoredly, not catching the gist, probably guessing here were two lovers quarreling.

Elissi blushed now with embarrassment, but raising her head, faced him out, as if across a shield rim. “Anackire has no jealousy. Anackire is everything,” she told him stingingly. “Anackire is the name we give the State of Life, of existence, body and soul, earth and eternity. But you give it the name Corrah, And so I came to your Corrah, and made an offering to your Corrah, since we seldom offer to Anackire, and Anackire isn’t yours.”

Chacor could only glare at her. Her flaming black jets of eyes glared back.

At last, “Why?” he said again.

“That the sympathy should pass directly to you, if able. As I’d speak where I could to a man in a language he knew. I asked that she might give you peace of mind.”

He missed that and grated, “But to you and yours, Corrah doesn’t exist.”

“All things exist. Look at that pebble lying there. You might call it um and I might call it oom. Isn’t it still a pebble, and lying there?”

An abrupt wave of relaxation swept over Chacor, stunning him. The girls of Moih were well-schooled in the means of debate. And how lovely this one was, summer-brown as a girl of Iscah, her color coming and going and her eyes on fire and her hair not like hair at all but a sheet of hot white light.

“Respite,” said Chacor, a term he had picked up from the dueling etiquette of Alisaar. “Put down your sword, lady. You’ve won. My apologies. Your father sacrifices to Zarok, too, doesn’t he?”

Then she laughed. And then he remembered why she had made the offering.

Presently they were in a public garden under the yellow boughs, the princess climbing a tree, and the maid gone away to buy the juice of berries.

They were speaking of ordinary things, not even religion, and he had not questioned her again about the offering. Elissi had become a real person. Suddenly it came to him that she loved him. Though not in the normal headlong and demanding way to which his travels among young women had accustomed him.

He found it difficult thereafter not to flaunt himself, to make himself grand and beautiful in her eyes. But he must be cautious. There was jeopardy in this. She was not a flower of the wayside, but the protected daughter of a man who had himself lavished upon Chacor great kindnesses.

So, he restrained himself somewhat. But even so, he did tell her his beginnings, that he was a prince, and Corhl was far behind him. He did sit there with her under the trees and speak of the end of Saardsinmey. He let her see, not meaning to, not evading, the impress that had since then been upon him, as if the death cry of a million despairing hearts had darkened his own.

The afternoon tilted away toward sunset. A bloom dropped from the trees upon his hand. (Summer was going, too, toward its set.) He put the bloom in her hair. He had now been silent a long while, she with him. Looking at them, the passersby would think, perhaps, Chacor had some Lowland blood, and that they spoke within.

“The sintal grew in the old city of the south,” she said. “There was an elder language, then. Sintal, It means goddess-hair, ”

“Like yours,” he said, and wondered if he should bite out his tongue.

But Elissi only told him, “We say, we, too, are Anackire, for Anackire is all things, and all things one thing. Each of us has God within him, is God, Chacor.”

“You credit that souls come back to be bom again; death doesn’t count.”

“Even if,” she said, “that weren’t so, the terror and anguish of Saardsinmey is over. The pain is done, for them. And if the pain goes on for you, then let it be a part of you, Chacor. But not, Chacor Am Corhl, you a part of /r.”

They walked back in the youthful evening, one pair among scores of couples, drinking chilled fruit juice, praising the monkey as she walked daintily by their side on her long leash. The maid had found her own young man, a carter from Marble Street, and been allowed to run away until the dinner hour.

He permitted himself no familiarity. He did not even take her hand.

At dinner, he spoke to Jerish, accepting the company of the soldiers going toward Xarabiss, and asking after a zeeba he could now afford to hire. On Arn Yr he next attempted to leave ten silver parings, and was refused.

Later, looking for Elissi in the garden, Chacor did not find her. He was sorry and relieved.

Somewhere on the two-and-a-half-day ride up to the fort, Jerish and his sergeant sold Chacor the soldier’s life. Partly it was done, he thought in confusion soon after, by inquiring what he meant to aim for in Xarabiss, or Dorthar? Then he as well would have to inquire into his prospects. He had always been a drifter, taking up brawling as a trade, but, in Alisaar, he had learnt something of chariots, of hiddraxi and zeebas, and of the methods of the sword. Now soldiering seemed to present itself as this same trade and learning, in better harness. He had begun to get on with Jerish and his officers, and the mixed “pack,” which called itself the Plains Wolves, were a lively bunch, three-quarters yellow Moiyan and a quarter everything else under the sun. Black-bronze skin did not debar from command, either, Jerish was proof. While the Dortharian captain who was to govern the Dortharian peacetime battalion in the fort, was a white blond.

Besides, after this paid brawl got stale, Chacor could opt out of it. As Jerish assured him, provided he gave due warning of intended departure, and providing New Alisaar or Ommos were not actually training ballistas on the city, there would be no checks.

Once he was in, and the cut and dried rigmarole of military training started, Chacor wished himself off and away. But it was too late then. Moih’s new recruits received two months’ pay in advance. Thereafter, they kept an eye on you.

Then, he began not to mind it so much.

He began to discover brothers, against whom he could try his strength and his fighting wiles as much as he wanted, and still go drinking with them in the village under the walls at night.

The city he returned to for his leaves, or more usually went up across the border into windy Xarabian Sar, from which Raldnor the hero had claimed false derivation. Rehger Chacor had lost touch with. Jerish said the Lydian was still employed by Vanek. Arn Yr, intent once more on profitable voyaging, beyond one visit Chacor avoided. (He did not see her, either.)

Just before the winter closed down, in the interim of thaw, there was a tirr hunt. The filthy beasts had been massing in the area, their castings and stench marking the tracks and trails, and there were stories of gypsies and village children poisoned by their claws. Tirr were hated worse than any wolves. Chacor, who had hunted them in Corhl, had some tips to offer which proved effective. They wiped out three nests, and brought home one whole flat-skulled jutting earless head and flange of talons, carefully unvenomed, to set by stealth on the officers’ supper dish.

Winter was bleak, and they damned it extravagantly, always ritualistically complaining about the weather, the difficulty of getting to Moiyah and Xarabiss. The fires blazed high in the mess. On sentry-go you might watch the stars Elyrian fashion, in the winter clarity of sky above the turrets by night. Beneath, the bay had frozen and the sea was plates of ice. The white fields stretched off from the fort the other side. Chacor favored a mix-Sarish girl, but she was like all the other free girls he had gone with. By the time of the thaw rains, they had even-temperedly done with each other.

It was Jerish and Annah’s wedding that spring. The Plains Wolves were heading back to the city garrison. Chacor had for three months been moving upward, and was now offered the rank of division sergeant under a Moiyan captain. It meant another stint at the fort. But with hunting weather returning and the leave-route open again to Xarabiss, he was not unwilling to stay. Best of all, there were tales not merely of tirr but of bandits in force on the border. It was in Chacor yet, the viral restlessness that sought release in combat.

He did go to the wedding. He was chosen by Jerish in fact to be one of the Raiding Party—a custom of the wedding—along with Vathcrian cousins and boyhood friends from the army. He could not have said no.

In the uproar and festivity he did not properly see Elissi until the dancing began. Moih had a form of dance not yet popular in Vis lands. Here the sexes mingled, hand-locked, man with girl, in long lines. Elissi came by with a soldier of the Wild Cats. She looked still and smiling, but her face was not vivacious, as Chacor remembered. Mostly he saw how the winter had paled her skin. What had been Iscaian honey was now Amanackire snow.

They spoke some words to each other during the evening, wishing the bridal couple well.

He had long since made his own offering to Corrah, precious oil and wine. Blood sacrifice was not the vogue in Moih for any of the gods, except at certain seasons when the carcasses were immediately portioned and distributed to the needy. They never sacrificed to Anackire. So far as he knew they never gave her anything.

In the morning, he rode out again for the fort, soldierly and somewhat admired on the streets.

Then, in Sheep Lane, at a silversmith’s, he saw Elissi, perhaps a foot high and made of silver, standing in the shop-front.

He stopped his mount and stared. In the end, he walked into the shop. A curlicued Xarab came out at him, and Chacor, aggrieved, pointed at the statuette.

“You wish to buy?” The Xarab seemed dubious. “This isn’t cheap.”

“Who made it?”

“I see you are a connoisseur. I will be honest with you.” (Dishonesty shone radiant from his brow). “Not a master. An apprentice, but of a reputable studio, the worthy Vanek’s. Obviously a pupil of mighty promise, you will agree? Would I, indeed, accept an inferior cast?”

A strange suspicion made Chacor say slowly, “An Alisaarian.”

“So I am led to believe. From that tragic city torn by the hell mountain last year.”

Looking more closely, Chacor saw the resemblance to Elissi was fleeting. Some memory had lodged, or else the model was a girl rather like her, but only in build and style of hair.

“Very fine,” said Chacor, dazed.

He went out of the shop, nothing bought, and the Xarab bowed to him in such a way that adjacent booths began to chortle, but Chacor did not hear.

The bandit, whose other choice was an escort to Sar, elected to betray his leader’s hideout. Moiyah was reckoned lenient to criminals; she fined or imprisoned them. Xarabian-Dortharian Sar, on the other hand, tended to maim or crucify them on the terrace under the altar of the wind gods.

Of Chacor’s detachment, twenty-five men, he sent five back to the fort with their debilitated captives. The engagement, an ambush in a stony defile, Chacor had foreseen. It was not too difficult, for the terrain begged for something of the sort. The dead robbers they buried; Moih, who burned her own dead Lowlander-wise, gave specific instructions.

So far the fort had not lost a man on this expedition. The local bandit population had been decimated. Chacor was justly not displeased, and his men were positively jolly, although the Moiyans tended to crow less over killing.

The fort meanwhile was now some days behind them. The mission had sent them northeastward. Technically they were out of Moih, on the map of the Plains, and that evening they made camp on a low eminence with a view of the Xarabian border. The hideaway should be a task for the morning, but Chacor fancied a night attack, which he was keeping from any of the bandit king’s spies who might be about.

As the cook-fires sent up lazy smoke, Chacor’s scout noticed a movement three miles off, over the barren folds of landscape. The sun-blushed dust was skirling there, intermittently, but only in one generalized spot.

“Dust devils?” said Chacor, who was not yet properly used to the Plains.

“No sir. Not really late enough in the year. Not enough dust.”

“You joke with me,” said Chacor. Like the scout, he was powdered head to foot.

The scout grinned. “Unless I have it wrong, sir, that’s the Dragon Gate smack against the border, where that dust dance is.”

Chacor had seen the Gate several times by now, going up and down to and from Sar. It gave him an eerie sensation that caused him to invoke Corrah, but that was all. He said, they had better go and see, put the camp on dignified alert not to excite possible watchers, and with three men galloped off northward, with the sun in a sinking rage on the left hand.

As he rode along then, Chacor came to feel that there was something uncanny about the evening. It was nothing he could put a hand on—maybe only the red sideways light, the success of the jaunt, the little command he now had going to his head, in the warrior fellowship of fighting shoulder to shoulder. Or maybe it was something in the weather. They had been hearing of summer hail and flash-floods farther north, and that a series of earth tremors in Dorthar, where they had become a triviality and were mostly ignored, had nonetheless created enough damage to send the population to its temples. Yet, he was not uneasy, merely sensitized. Even if the moving dust were a ploy of the bandit lord’s—which he doubted—four armed men, mailed, on cavalry zeebas, would be a match for it.

As they crossed the last mile, and the dim shape of the pillars of the Gate came visible like ghosts through the dust, Chacor’s skin prickled. It was the sensation a Lowlander would have called flatly Anackire—their label it seemed to him for any random otherness.

Then he heard the shouting. It was human, both irate and desperate. And then, the long-drawn, gut-twisting screech of tirr.

Two of the three men he had brought along were expert javelineers. As he gave them the word, they were already reaching, ready.

They sprinted through the dust.

It was almost a tableau. A slope with boulders and a stand of sunburnt trees. A wagon with empty shafts, now and then slipping and bucking on the slope, hitting the dust up in spouts. Two men were on the wagon, trying to hold it, and at the same moment whirling a staff apiece—torches, smoking and invisibly flaring in the sunset. Six tirr crouching, mauling the wagon sides. Abruptly one beast, two, springing, meeting fire and slewing aside.

“Anack!” swore the mix javelineer.

No one waited. Next instant two of the tirr were pinned by iron. A third spun and came at them. Chacor kicked his zeeba, leaned forward and rode straight at the tirr, seeing only the death-ripe claws, the red coins of the eyes, swerving, and his sword coming edgeways down across the mangey neck. The beast collapsed and he jerked his mount away from the death throe and the talons—Looked up and saw a third javelin had done its work, and the third man had another tirr on its back, not yet risking pulling out his sword. That one was a female with sallow furrowed nipples—she had been suckling young not long before.

The last of the creatures crouched hesitating, vicious, unnerved. Once you had hunted them, you knew they were inclined more to kill than to preserve themselves. Gaining some fluke of escape, often they would not take it if they might inflict another wound.

Full grown men seldom survived a single scratch, unless cauterized within five minutes. A slender woman or a child—it was hopeless.

Chacor sat there staring into the red eyes. The hiatus was unnatural. Were they considering, he and his men, they would spare the brute?

Suddenly Chacor was thinking of a name. It was the name by which Rehger had called his lover, the Amanackire—Aztira. This had a likeness to the other name—tirr. The notion was irrelevant, disquieting.

“Finish!” Chacor shouted.

A fourth javelin went over. The tirr seemed to leap snapping toward it, to embrace it, and fell back heavily, stone dead. One of the other tirr was still spasming. You could not dare go and put it out of its misery even, that was too chancy.

The two men from the wagon had stopped making a noise and lowered their torches. One, a Xarabian, jumping down, with help from the mix soldier shoved stones under the wheels.

The other man, not Xarabian, but Vis-dark (and Plains dusty), had also swung down.

“Soldiers from the Moih fort, aren’t you?”

“Our respects,” said Chacor.

“Well, sergeant, you’ve saved our chops this evening. But we deserved it. What a day we’ve had. First we were robbed—hence our lack of zeebas or any knives, not to mention my employer’s irreplaceable samples—then attacked by tirr. Your sublime goddess must have sent you to our aid.”

The goddess Corrah, thought Chacor resolutely. But he inclined his head. His men were occupied with carcasses. The one kicking tirr was now lifeless. Chacor dismounted. He went over to the man, and saw he was very tall, and in earliest middle-age, which his agility and energy had perhaps belied. The flaming sky was behind him, then as he, too, came forward, holding out a commodious hand, Chacor received a shock. The man off the wagon was Rehger. Rehger in twenty years’ time.

Chacor gave his hand in return.

“Chacor Am Corhl,” he said, friendly, feeling clever, feeling slightly drunk.

“Yennef Am Lan. Am everywhere it begins to seem.”

About a hundred feet away, the two giant pillars of the Dragon Gate, white, unfeatured, went soaring upward, losing themselves in the coming of the dusk.

“An historic place for our adventure,” said Yennef, Rehger’s father, glancing toward them. “Don’t they say, the first Vis kings came to earth there, carried in the bellies of dragons?”

Chacor shrugged. “That’s the mythos of Dorthar. You’re in the Lowlands now. Come, share our camp. Maybe we can cheer you a little regarding robbers.”

Supper was, again, grilled dust rat and hard biscuit, and some agreeable wine from the fort village, unadulterated by water.

As it got dark, and the stars of the Plains, thick-strewn and effulgent, appeared overhead, they sat talking in the firelight. Yennef gave the impression of being communicative. He was much-traveled—of everywhere, as he had titled himself—Lanelyr, the Middle Lands . . . Vardish Zakoris . . . and Iscah, too, Chacor inwardly observed. The man was an accomplished wanderer, what Chacor might have been, or might still become. Yennef, too, had done “some soldiering in youth.” For the present, he earned his bread as an agent for a merchant guild in Xarar, and his masters were not going to love him since he had been robbed. Chacor described briefly the plan to raid the bandit nest. Yennef promptly offered his help. “If you can loan me a mount and a sword, I’ll eat my luck as I find it. I can still fight, and after today I’d like one.” “And to take an order?” said Chacor. Yennef said, “I’ll admit, I never served under so young an officer when I was your age. But, of course.” The Xarabian, however, Yennef excused. The man was his servant and, as you saw, not tough. He had been brave with the tirr perforce.

It was not yet Zastis, and there was no moon. Chacor sent scouts along the slopes an hour later, where they unearthed some snoozing bandit lookout. He was persuaded into picturing the nest in some detail, which corresponded with prior information. Gathering his men, and leaving the Xarab and two watch in the fire-ringed camp, to make a camplike stir, they set off.

When they got there, about midnight, the raid was quickly accomplished, for the robbers had been smug enough to bed down for the night. Javelins brought the sentries crashing. Next it was hand to hand. The den was in the undershore of a raised embankment with an old ruined wall on it. Some thirty villains came flying and stumbling down from the crest or out of holes. Three or four were mixes. The king himself had light gray eyes. It was an undistinguished fight, with no openings for prowess, for the thieves were used to attacking unarmed civilians. As it turned out, Yennef s robbers were another crew, parasites without the instinct to murder—they and the Xarar goods had gone elsewhere. Nevertheless there was some quantity of loot in the dirty shambles of the warren. Yennef, having acquitted himself very well, got a promise of compensation for himself and his master.

Before sunrise everything was settled, the surrendered foe roped and haltered, having been pressed into burying their own dead. Chacor’s detail had only three serious casualties. Since Yennef s wagon was going on to the fort, it proved a convenient vehicle for their transport.

Yennef rode alongside Chacor on the route west. He continued chatty over the evening fires. He seemed perfectly sociable and outgoing. Yet when Chacor, who had a leave due him and now badly wanted to take it in Moiyah, suggested they might go that way together, Yennef put him off. “Even with the peerless zeebas hired from your fort, wagons make slow riding. We’d hold you back.” Chacor, who had the northwest Visian’s utter abhorrence of homosexuality, wondered if Yennef and his weapon-shy Xarab servant were bedfellows and did not want interruptions. He did not care to regard Rehger’s father in that manner, so concluded there was some other secret.

“Well,” he said, as they got up to the fort, “do you know where you’ll be lodging in Moiyah?”

“Oh. Some inn.”

“Don’t think I’m prying. But this compensation. I’ll be in charge of that. Til need to have some means to meet you in the city.”

“Ah, the compensation. Well, sergeant, isn’t there a famous wine-shop called the Amber Anklet?”

“For sure. On Amber Street. And I can recommend it. A lot of Dortharians drink there.”

“Do they? A Xarabian told me about it. Say you go there and ask for me. When I get your message, I’ll call on you,”

Chacor, having no fixed abode in the city, and feeling they were now playing a silly game, said, “I tell you what. Be at the Anklet the first evening of the new month.”

“That’s Zastis. Won’t you be engaged elsewhere?”

“I’ll make sure I’m not.”

Yennef gave him an odd look. Did Yennef now think he was being propositioned?”

“You’re too generous,” said Yennef, “all this care about getting me requited for a few ragged blows with a lent sword.”

“Moiyan codes,” said Chacor. “Even if I hated your insides, my friend, I’d have to do it.”

He rode for the city full-tilt, and half a mile off—to increase the drama—the sky soured purple and a summer storm of grandiose violence encompassed him.

Vanek’s studio on Marble Street was the first place he went.

There was some flurry there, for they were getting the buckets uncovered on the roof to catch the downpour. (Rain water, when no sah wind was blowing from the sea, was judged the better for the studio’s needs than that of the public cisterns.) Vanek was not present. The apprentices were running everywhere at once, the studio offices empty but for desks, and the outer shop contained one attendant and one rich mix idler, poking amid a cupboardful of ivories after a “something.” Of Rehger there was no hint. A clerk, hastening to his midday snack, informed Chacor that seeking Rehger meant the house of Arn Yr.

Chacor pelted out, remounted and dashed through the running streets under the pouring rain.

He knew from Jerish, now set up with Annah in the married state on Amber Street, that her father was away with Pretty Girl, trading along the Xarabian coast and up to Ommos. The steward in the outer hall of the house told Chacor that Arn Yr’s wife was also away, at an embroidery group in the home of a friend. They were approaching the whereabouts of Rehger, when Arn Yr’s younger daughter appeared suddenly from a doorway.

The steward fell silent.

Chacor and Elissi, equally silent, looked at one another.

He was like a being of fire, so fast-ridden, so keyed up, and so drenched by the tempest that even now straddled the roof and drummed the slates.

She was luminously beautiful, with garden flowers in her hand—she had been arranging them in a vase—scarcely tinted with summer and now extremely pale.

“Thank you,” she said to the steward. “Won’t you come in here?” she asked Chacor.

For a fact, seeing her had checked him. He had thought of her, been reminded of her by innumerable items on endless occasions. Now a sort of calm flowed over him, as once before in her presence. He thanked her in turn, and walked into the room which gave on a covered corner of the garden.

She laid the flowers on a table. She stood gazing at him. Her whole body seemed expressive of a question.

Intent on his own question, he did not think how it must appear to her. She saw he had ridden there headlong, through the rain, on some impassioned errand. Because she wanted this to be herself, how could she suspect that it was not?

“Elissi—I know you’ll pardon the state of me and my hurry, it’s on a matter of importance—”

She stood and gazed on him.

Something did then communicate itself, but the impetus of all the past days was not to be turned in a moment.

“I must speak to Rehger the Lydian,” Chacor said.

Her face went white, “I—they—told me he was here.” Chacor ended, not hearing what he said. He had just realized, after all, what she had been thinking.

In a few instants she lowered her eyes and moved to the table where she had laid the flowers.

“I’m so sorry, Chacor, but he isn’t here. Didn’t Jerish say, Rehger has lodgings near the Academy. If he isn’t with Master Vanek—”

“Elissi,” said Chacor.

She was arranging the flowers in the vase, with quiet steady hands.

“Of course, he does visit father. But father is voyaging.”

“Elissi—”

She paused, looked at him, shook her head as if to say, A silly mistake, no harm has been done.

It occurred to Chacor that, although the prospect of astoundingly surprising both Yennef Am Lan and Rehger Am Ly Dis had been his motive for charging into Moiyah at midday in a thunderstorm, perhaps it was not all the reason. Of course Jerish must have mentioned Rehger lived by the Academy of Arms, where he still took Swordsman’s exercise. Chacor now seemed to recall this. And Vanek’s clerk had also said that Vanek himself would return in half an hour. Chacor might have waited. In fact, the clerk had not, had he, said Rehger was at Arn Yr’s house at all. He had said Chacor should ask there. Superfluous. Yet here, everything muddled, Chacor had rushed.

Destiny had presented itself to Chacor on the Plains in the shape of Rehger’s father, arrived in accordance with a psychic prophesy now almost a year old. Destiny—or call it Anackire—did exist. Maybe he had always supposed so, or wanted it, that sense of being held, however lightly, in a vast cupped hand. Whatever you did, whatever befell you, it was possible at certain moments to cease floundering, to let go. To float, and to fall, through inner space.

There she poised above the flowers, in the shadow a figurine of silver.

Chacor said, “What I told you. That isn’t why I came here. Or, it was, but now is not. If I speak to your father, will he cast me through an upper window?”

“Speak about what?” said she. Her voice was colorless. Had she not felt the levinbolt strike the house?

“You. Isn’t it the custom here? To get permission of a girl’s father?”

She put down the flowers again but did not turn to him now.

“What are you saying, Chacor?”

What was he saying? Before, it was always, I’m dying for you, let me have you. It had even been, now and then, falsely, I love you. Before the billowy bed or the warm hillside accommodated them.

To keep himself in order, not to shame himself with sugary words he could not speak, he spoke instead the ancient marriage oath of a prince of Corhl.

“By the goddess, I will take and have you, now and all my days. You shall be mine as my own flesh is mine. As my necessary bones are mine, so needful you shall be to me. And I will spill my blood for you. I will come together with you to make the magic of lifegiving. The goddess is a woman. She hears what I say. Let me be no more a man if ever I deny these words.”

It was old, the oath, if not as old as the jungles and the swamps, old as the first speaking men who had known themselves Corrah’s. Chacor himself had heard his own father make the oath many times, marrying carelessly this woman and that. In the common mouth of Corhl, the words had become debased. But they remained the Words, and he had given them to her, to this pale girl of the Lowlands. And having said them, burning and proud, astonished and elated, irrevocably fixed now to the course, he added, “By the law of Corhl, I’ve married you, Elissi. But by the law of Moih we must be betrothed, I know. If your father lets me have you. Beautiful Elissi.”

She had waited for him to stop. Now, she picked up another flower and put it into the vase.

The storm was over, and the rain had slackened on the path outside. Chacor sobered. “At least,” he said, “say yes.”

“No,” said Elissi.

Months after, she assured him it was not feminine vengeance. The reverse had been so abrupt, she had not trusted him to know, she said. She had given him doubt’s benefit, in case he might at leisure repent. But in a way, which she did not refer to, it was also her insight. He was a warrior, Chacor, a hunter. The prey had been too readily caught, there was no duel. So she gave him one, a chase and a fight. She let him, now he was sure he wanted her, pursue and battle through the whole of Zastis. And to tangle matters further, there came that afternoon an alarm of Alisaarian pirates back up the coast, and a recall to the fort.

The business with Rehger and Yennef tallied with the rest. A deputy sent to the Amber Anklet on the correct evening either missed the Lan, or the Lan was not there.

It became an affair of, I will tell Rehger when the alert’s off and I catch up to the fellow. Then, alert, over, I’ll keep it to myself. Is anything so pat? Probably the likeness was imagined. For by then, thwarted by Elissi, the sense of destiny was wearing thin.

She consented before winter, when the sintal blooms were dropping with a fermenting perfume, making the fish tipsy in Arn’s tank. Arn, home from a successful trip, had already acquiesced. Rehger was nowhere to be found. And Yennef—he had been an hallucination, an excuse for allowing oneself to acknowledge love.

“Yes, I love you,” she said.

She put her arms about Chacor’s neck and he kissed her, kissed her, thinking there was nothing so sweet and alive and holy on the earth, for she had made him suffer long enough for that. Lovers who love are gods, poets said in Free Alisaar. “Of course,” she said. “That is Anackire.”

And thus Chacor found, despite himself, he had been married to Moih, to the Lowlands, to the Dream of the serpent goddess. A Moiyan wedding indeed.

15 Anackire’s Design

The Raiding Party marched up Amber Street to the thud of drums, clash of cymbals, and whirr of rattles, their torches flapping. All along the sunset avenues, the crowds of Moiyah applauded and donated them fortune, and commented that the bridegroom was a charmer.

Chacor, who had reached the city friendless and lacking occupation almost two years before, was now a captain of one hundred, and included two other captains and a major (Jerish) in his warlike wedding band. They were all barking with laughter and exchanging jests and, as tradition decreed, vowing to put Arn Yr’s house to the torch if he refused them. Caught up in the play, intent on his role, crazy to get his girl that wretched custom had also not allowed him near for seven days, the last thing on Chacor’s mind was Rehger, absently invited to the feast, or a man once met by the Dragon Gate.

The Amber Anklet Inn was busy, and through the open doors, in the courtyard, a host of drinkers saw the Raiding Party and came howling out, offering gratis cups of wine. This likewise was tradition, and while the young men fortified themselves the cries went up: “You make that ruffian give her over! Burn the house down if he won’t.” An inn girl ran to Chacor and kissed him, and when she drew back, he saw Yennef Am Lan standing five feet away, meeting his eyes, but not eagerly.

Chacor gave a louder bark. The Lan immediately shifted, as if to slip aside into the inn.

“Jerish,” said Chacor, “Baed, all of you, there’s a man there I asked to my wedding who wouldn’t come.”

“Must be a friend of her wicked father’s!” shouted Captain Baed, entering farther into things. “Get him!”

Yennef was not quick enough to elude a determined sortie of this kind, with the inn drinkers noisily assisting on all sides.

“Not go to his wedding? Thrash the felon!”

Yennef was brought to Chacor. Yennef was all smiles now.

“Well met again. Am I to understand you’re going to claim a bride, sergeant?”

“Captain, my dear old friend,” said Chacor, embracing Yennef. “So happy you’ll be with me.”

“To the hilt. What else?”

Chacor said to Jerish: “I mean it. I’m deadly in earnest. Don’t let that darling get away.”

“Tsk. Your mind should be only on Elissi.”

“It is. But this is the matter of Anackire.”

Jerish raised his brows. Chacor’s use of such a phrase amused him. Nevertheless he said to Baed, “We’re to keep him close, that one. We’re serious, you understand.”

Tiddly and obliging, Baed agreed.

All in communion then, the Raiding Party marched on, Yennef borne in its midst.

“Open your doors! Open your doors!”

Neighbors on balconies and leaning over sills threw ribbons and flowers.

“Open up, or we’ll bum you out!”

The doors were opened.

Arn Yr, in elegant regalia, stood with a drawn sword in the hall.

“My daughter you shall not have.”

“I have sworn to have her,” said Chacor in ringing tones, enjoying it after all. “I have sworn by my gods. By Anackire,” he added, to see Arn Yr’s face.

“No,” said Arn Yr. “My daughter must remain with me. She is my jewel.”

“She shall be that to me,” said Chacor. “Are you with me, my boys?” he asked the Raiders. They yelled and stamped, and Arn Yr’s servants came pounding into the hall, grinning hugely and toting cudgels.

Then the priest spoke from the stair.

“Men, now listen to the voice of the woman.”

And down the stair came Elissi.

She wore the Moih wedding-gown that was passed, mother to daughter, sister to sister, aunt to niece, cousin to cousin, for generations. It was a loose garment of woven thread-of-gold, belted by a sash of white silk. On the bride’s hair clung a rippling veil of sintal yellow. She was like every proper bride, more lovely than life.

She said, “My father, you are dear to me, but in the natural way I must leave you. Here is the man I choose.”

And Arn Yr threw down his sword and made the mock gesture of weeping.

And Chacor, in whose birthplace men were not permitted tears of any sort, having forgotten it, waited for Elissi to cross the floor and take his hand, which she did.

Then the priest came down in his dark robe with its fringes of Moiyan gold, and married them before their witnesses, by the fallen sword, in the sight of something which was not named, a goddess, or their own souls, or only the wakening stars above the roof.

The wedding feast, for which three interconnecting rooms had been opened, the double doors taken off their hinges, sailed like a shining lighted ship into the night.

Master Vanek found, with some interest at his elbow, glamorous and not entirely sober, the bridegroom.

“Master Vanek, where’s your apprentice?”

“Which?”

“The very talented one, whose casts for silver work go to Sheep Lane.”

Vanek looked lost, then he said, “But we’ve got farther than that. You mean Rehger Am Ly.”

“Don’t tell me he isn’t here.”

“I suppose he is, if you asked him to be. Have one of these salt-grapes.”

“Delicious. I must find him. Before I forget him altogether.”

“Hmm,” said Vanek. He called over another man, very nearly deformed, for his greatly muscled neck, torso and arms dwarfed the two bandy legs beneath. “Have you seen the Lydian?”

“In a cloud of women,” said this man, amicably, “discussing the price of bronze with Arn’s officer of deck.”

He led Chacor across the three rooms, introducing himself as they went as the sculptor Mur. He said his name with such diffidence, Chacor became aware he must be well-known in Moih, and had the social wit to thank him for coming to the wedding.

The last room opened on a stair to the garden. Rehger and two Moiyan beauties,.one sable, one saffron, were on the terrace with Arn’s deck master, and some others.

Mur stood surveying the scene. He indicated the Lydian, as if Chacor did not know him. “What a Raldnor he made,” said Mur, after a moment. His face expressed an absorbed, nonsexual admiration. “He fought professionally at Saardsinmey. By the goddess. He could hardly have made his body better if he’d hewn and carved it.” Mur tugged at his lip. “You heard of the mishap?”

“Up at the fort, we get little—”

“The statue was twice life-size, drawn out of the finest marble. I supervised the cutting of the block myself. I worked day and night. With such stone and such a model, it was a dedication, not a labor. Finished, it seemed to me some of my best work was in it, although the expression of the face—with that I could never satisfy myself.”

(Chacor fretted at Mur’s shoulder. Three rooms distant, Elissi was blooming. Corrah-Anackire speed this anecdote.)

“The features were kingly enough. I had no problem in that way. It’s no use taking a body from one and the head from another—a bedding in Aarl that is. But there was some obstacle. If I’d understood it, perhaps I could have surmounted it.” Mur made a sign with his left hand, averting dark thoughts. “The statue was completed despite my niggling, and to schedule. It was then moved, under guard, to Xarabiss. A couple of miles from the winter palace at Xarar, from a clear sky, a freak summer storm, A river burst its banks and came down on the riders. The zeebas panicked, awash to their girths. Men were swept under and almost drowned. The platform toppled over. The head of the statue was smashed off.”

Chacor swore swiftly. Even upon his hot impatience this ill-omened thing struck chill.

“Does Rehger know that?”

“Yes. He took it sensibly. The racers say, if a man heeded every stray shadow on the track, he’d be thrown at the first lap.”

“What of the Xarab king?”

“Refused the statue and any repair. He said the gods were against it. But he still paid up.”

Rehger turned at that moment, and saw them.

Yes, he could himself have been a king. They had said that in Alisaar, with the love-words. Now he seemed no different, the body kept at its vivid pitch by daily exercise, the commanding height, the curious completeness, nothing redundant. He no longer dressed like a lord, that was all. The clothes were those of a well-bred artisan on holiday, no adornment. A king in disguise.

He came over to Chacor.

“The best of congratulations.”

“I receive them with pleasure. Fill your cup. I want you to meet another of my wedding guests.”

The women on the terrace called plaintively as Chacor took him back into the house.

They had provided the tall handsome Lan with some refreshments, then locked him into an upstairs anteroom. If Arn knew about it was not certain. Jerish and Annah had now and then been seen lingering nearby, or Jerish’s fair-skinned, yellow-haired brother and his coppery Ommish wife. Once there had been some knocking on the inside of the door. Through the sounds of the feast it was not much audible. The Ommos lady went to the door, however, and said sternly, “Come, sir, would Yannul the Hero of Lan have behaved so timorously? Shush!”

“He’s in there,” said Chacor, bringing Rehger to the door.

Conceivably he expected Rehger to know already who this was, since they were operating within the design of the goddess. But Rehger only said, “Who is that?”

“My last wedding guest.”

“You’ve locked the door,” said Rehger. “Is he vicious?”

“By now that’s a possibility. So I’ve brought you, Swordsman, to quell him.”

Chacor unlocked the door, opened it, and guided Rehger to the doorway. Rehger paused, then moved forward, into the room. Chacor smartly shut the door and relocked it. Having listened a moment for the phonetics of assault and battery—there was only silence—he led his accomplices away.

Yennef was drinking the wine and eating the savory breads.

He looked at the man who had entered, and remarked, “I judge it would be unreasonable to ask for an explanation. After all, this is a marriage feast.”

The arrival was dark Vis . . . maybe he was an inch or so taller even than Yennef. Powerful, couth—almost a Dortharian demeanor. But when he spoke, it was the accent of Free Ahsaar.

“Perhaps you will,” he said, “accept both as an explanation and an apology, the fact that you are, sir, my father.”

Yennef became fly. He narrowed his eyes and took in more thoroughly what he was seeing. Then he drank from the wine-cup.

“Well, here and there, I’ve had that accusation made. Usually it’s by the woman involved.”

“My mother is in Iscah. Or, she may be dead. It isn’t an accusation. As I said, a fact.”

The Lan glanced him up and down, cool, and guarded.

“But perhaps I was never in Iscah.”

“Yes. It was winter. She said robbers had set on you.”

“No, no, my gallant,” said Yennef, “that was last summer, here. Bandits by the Dragon Gate.”

“You seem to have then, sir, a penchant for being robbed. She discovered you near the farm, disabled with a knife-cut in one arm. She persuaded the men to give you shelter, in the dog-house.” (Yennef ejected a virulent oath.) “Once you were fit, you went on your way, but before that you had my mother. Her name was Thioo.”

“I had her? You mean I forced her?”

“She went to you. She gave herself and you took.”

“Did I? It seems a man can get desperate, in the Iscah mountains. If I was there.”

“You left her a token.”

“Well, one finds one must. Doubtless you’ve found that, too.”

“An Alisaarian drak of bronze-mixed gold.”

“Oh. She must have been a spicy lay, then. I was poor in those days.”

“You remember those days.”

“No,” said Yennef, “but from your looks, it has to have been some twenty-five years ago.”

“A little more.”

“Ah, a little more.” Yennef had another drink. “You’re from Alisaar yourself.”

“The men on the farm sold me for a slave. I was shipped to Alisaar.”

“You don’t look like a slave.”

“I was a Saardsin Sword.”

A glint of fascination went under and over Yennef’s deliberate facade.

“That I do credit. I’ve seen them fight, and race. Saardsinmey had the best—and lost the best. Anack had you in her hand, if you survived the city.”

“They think here Anackire has all things in her hands.”

“She has enough hands,” said Yennef flippantly.

His mind, in spite of him, was burrowing. Each time he drank the yellow wine, he seemed to sink back another year, to some other place. Of course, he had been in Iscah, in Corhl and Var-Zakoris, too. There had been a mad expedition, anger and youth and some simpleton’s story, hopes of treasure—he could hardly recollect, only the fruitless venture and the traveling. There were plenty of escapades, and just as many girls. Dark women, smoky women, smooth skin and a smooring of night hair.

“So you had your friends abduct me on the street because you claim I’m your father.”

The younger man said, “No, I’m as startled as you, to find you here. But they recognized you, no doubt.”

“I see. It’s that we have a resemblance to each other. It does make some sense.”

“Don’t you,” said the younger man quietly—he had stayed even and polite throughout, under Yennef’s attempts to heat him up—“have a knife scar on your left arm?”

“Two or three as it happens. Shall I strip my sleeve? You can choose which one’s Iscaian.”

Yennef finished the wine.

The other man said, “You see, we’d have no business with each other, except that there are questions I should like to ask you.”

“I’m not rich,” said Yennef. “And anyway, I have a legal wife, in Dorthar, and three legal sons.”

“The questions have nothing to do with your estate, sir.”

“Yennef. Call me Yennef. I’m not some antique gray beard. I used to be your age, not a hundred years ago. My sons have less respect, I can assure you. And my wife’s a ravening shrew.” The wine was going to his head.

“Then I won’t ask you,” said the other, calm, inexorable, “to strip your sleeve. I’ll strip mine.” And putting his hand to a plaited leather wristlet—a badge of the Artisan’s Guild in Moih, now Yennef considered it—he loosed and pulled it off. He came forward then, and showed to Yennef in the lamplight the lean articulate hand and muscled forearm of a professional fighter, itself with one streamlined scar which ended at the wrist. Here, where the wristlet had been and the scar ended, the skin was clasped in a circlet of dull silver scales.

“Aside from the scars of knives,” he said, “will you tell me, Yennef, do you have a mark on you like this?”

Yennef felt giddy. It was the final years peeling away. He had suddenly recalled the barren mountain valleys, the blue-white snow piled up like death, and warm beauty slender as a bone that found him there, wedged with the dog among the rocks.

“I don’t,” he said. “Not I. But my father had a callus like that. As you have it, on the left wrist. It was broader in him, it ran as far as the lower joint of the thumb. He never hid it. He was proud of it. He used to have his sleeve cut slightly short, on the left arm. You know what it is?”

“The snake mark, the sigil of the line of Amrek, the Storm Lord.”

Yennef shook himself, trying to shift from one dimension to another, out of the past.

“Who told you? Your mother?”

“Not my mother. A sorceress of the Lowlanders.”

“Ah.” Yennef stared at his son, and saw himself at long last, in the golden mirror. None of his Dortharian getting—known scarcely better than this one—had returned such a likeness. They took after their dam, and had her stupidity to add burnish. “It’s come to me,” said Yennef. “I mean, going with your mother. Tibo—that was it, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, Tibo. Thioo, in Iscah.”

“You say—you don’t know if she’s dead?”

Still quiet, reasonable: “It was an ungenerous life. She wasn’t well-treated. Women in those parts seldom were.”

“I didn’t think of it—getting her with child. And then those cretinous blockheads sold you. How old were you? For the stadium, it can’t have been much more than five or six.”

Abruptly Yennef turned away. He walked off and sat down in a hard stiff chair, and put his head in his hands.

He said after a moment, “You embarrass me. I don’t know you, or what to say.”

“My name is Rehger. They used to call me the Lydian, in Alisaar.”

“That’s kudos, isn’t it—fame by name of the birthplace—Anack’s breasts, I’ve heard of you. I laid a bet on you—three years—four years back—I was at Jow. I only saw you at a distance, an inexpensive seat. But you won. Blade and spear. A hundred silver draks. I should have risked more—”

“At least,” Rehger said, “that repaid your outlay on Tibo.”

Yennef looked up. He rose to his feet, straightening himself.

“I don’t expect or want your filial regard. Swordsman.”

“We’re strangers to each other,” Rehger said. “But I’d value my history, if you can give it me.”

“You want to boast your descent from Amrek Accursed-of-Anackire on the streets of Anackire’s Moih?”

Rehger smiled, as Yennef had seen princes do, when they wished to put you at ease. The eyes were like her eyes, if Yennef could only remember what she had looked like. For he could not, of course.

Only that she had been beautiful, and a lucky find. Though there was one single image, almost supernatural, flickering between the shadow and the red whisper of a fire—when she had come to him—and he had thought, or only said he thought—the goddess, Cah—

“There’s no more wine in this jug,” said Yennef. “And that damned Zakorian or whatever he is, the prankish bridegroom, has locked the door again.”

But trying the door, they learned another had come at some time to turn the key. They were at liberty.

16 The Charioteer

Rehger rode out of the city in the black chariot of war, among the soldiery and the banners, under the burnt-blue lid of the sky. And the crowds of the city cried and shouted, and the women threw withered garlands and silks like blood. And the rumble of the marching feet, the wheels, the drums and rattles, were the voice of the storm, going down to battle and to death.

But as he stood there, shackled and scaled by armor, his thoughts had stayed behind in the temple of his gods beside the river.

Drought had shrunk the river up. On the temple steps dead lilies stank and a spiny water-thing had died. A haze lay on the river, a haze of incense in the temple aisle. The gods towered from the mist, their bodies that were nearly human, their dragon heads, glimmering in the light of propitiating flame.

“Have no fear, great ones,” he said. “I’ll ask you for nothing, as I know quite well you will give me nothing.” Yet they did have something to give.

For, out of the shadow stole his mother, Tibo. She was garbed, and even her hair was dressed, in the manner of the queens of Dorthar and the jewelry fashions of Koramvis. But her skin was painted white, as the face of his enemies.

She said, “The Lowlander will kill you, Amrek.”

Then she called him names and railed against him. She was terrified. They balanced, as did all things that morning, on the edge of the world. The fall was not to be avoided. But when he turned from her, she stayed him. She was not Tibo, surely, but Val Mala, that woman whose soul was so young it was purblind, half mad. Her existence had been that of a sensual, spiteful and selfish child. Now she was a savage child, frightened even from its child’s cunning, abetted by a poisoned knife. “Hear the truth from me,” she said.

And she told him then how he had been got on her by her lover, conniving in her bed. He was not the son of the king, no Storm Lord, not Rehdon’s sowing—as was Raldnor, who would kill him. He had no identity. An imposter, the gods of Dorthar denied and would cast him down.

When she stopped, he had nothing to say to her.

He did not interrogate her, or reject her words. Nothing in his life, and nothing in that crucial instant, gave him the impetus to do so.

And very soon, borne forward by the chariot of fate, war and death, he rode from the city, off the world’s edge, into a country without wars or cities, or rivers, without titles, gods, or names.

The pre-dawn stirring about the cattle-market wakened him, as normally it always did, two hours before the sky lost its Visian darkness. His routines were recurrent but flexible. Breakfast was to be had among the stalls and charcoal braziers by the market gate, with drovers and watchmen. If it was a day for early exercise, he would cross the three streets to the Academy of Arms. For his monthly fee, morning or evening, he could engage Moiyah’s best sword-masters, Dortharian-trained, (who in turn vied to duel with a professional, sometimes set him to school others and saw him paid for it.) The standard of the gymnasium courts was not far below those of a stadium. Otherwise one had access to the Academy baths, their staff of barbers, and masseurs, and, if one wished it, the periphery talent of fortune-tellers, betting cliques, commercial telepaths and joy-girls.

Moih being Moih, it was nothing at the Academy to see a rich man’s soft sons working out, or gambling, with the garrison soldiers or sturdy porters from the docks. Rehger’s personal myth had become known among them and he was greeted there as “Lydian, even by the elite of the Racers’ Guild, who spoke of their horses as if they were mistresses, and of not much else.

Usually, by the time the sky had melted to Lowlander pallor, the Lydian was on Marble Street.

But between Marble Street and the Academy, in a small wine-shop known as the Dusty Flower, Rehger and Yennef had spent Chacor’s wedding night. Until the third. Vis-black hour of morning, they sat either side the table. To the house’s sorrow, they drank no vast amount, neither did they talk to any lavish extent. A stilted frankness stumbled between them. There was a kind of distaste, a reluctance to remain and, curiously, eventually, a hesitation at parting.

They had no physical contact. They broke from each other, the two men, like thieves who have planned a crime, or perhaps met to review one long committed.

Rehger did not think he would see the Lan (his father) again.

After all this, there was less than an hour for sleep, but Rehger took it, and dreamed the dream, which the words of Yennef had probably imposed on him.

“The line of descent is easy enough. I have it by heart, for what it’s worth. The woman was a prophetess, a priestess. Safca. Amrek’s daughter, by some courtesan, who escaped into Lan when the Lowland War reached Dorthar. This Safca might not have been reckoned, except that she had the snake mark on her wrist.”

She became holy, Safca, in the upheavals of her time. In the peace which followed, she married into the royal house of Lan, a subsidiary branch. She bore one son late in life, Yalen, a prince, marked as she was, in the same way. Yalen who had his left sleeves cut short to show the brand of Anack. . . . When he was in his forty-sixth year, he fathered a bastard on a serving-girl in a village hostelry. It was on a hunting trip. He used to sport and say, “That spring I acquired the seven wolfskins and Yennef, in the backhills.”

The Lan did not relate this with any bite. There had been anger, once, but it altered to irony. The hill girl had walked every step of the road to the capital, and sought out Prince Yalen on Audience Day, with the yowling baby wrapped in her apron. “He was decent to her. He set her up with a tavern in the city, and took me into his household. He had his lawful heirs. Besides, in Lan, the closer the blood-tie the more the offspring are worth. The old man had married his half-sister for that. The slough of the pot-wench wasn’t worth anything. But he was fair to me. I was allotted the title it’s customary to award, in such a case. They call you the god-gift. That was Yennef, the god-gift. The trophy Yalen never wanted that the gods forced him to have.”

He grew up chafing, could not recall when it started. At thirteen he stowed away on a Xarabian ship. That was the beginning of his travels.

“The year he got the wolfskins and Yennef. I never even had the goddess mark. But the bloodline’s simple. Have you memorized it? Amrek to Safca, Safca to Yalen, Yalen to Yennef. Yennef—to Rehger Am Ly Dis.” And Yennef had added, “Get a son. Pass the commodity on. Life, I mean. The trade of living.”

In the subfusc of the Flower, his face blurred and often averted, Yennef seemed, by his coordinated movements, his light voice, the ironic remnant of his youthful anger, a very young man still.

“There is a tale, mind you, Amrek was never sired by Rehdon the Storm Lord. Mala the bitch-queen had him off the king’s counselor, in order to hold on to her status—Rehdon couldn’t plough her, they said. She scared him so his seed went to water. It might be, or it might not. She was a wicked slut, brainless. She might have miscalculated, or spread lies. She hated her only son.”

Surely she had, had hated Amrek. Rehger had felt her hate strike like venomed steel on his bones.

And Amrek had believed her. Or he was beyond caring. In the arena it might happen sometimes, there would be a man like that. Come for an appointment with death.

But Amrek was gone, into the past. Rehger—hearing the sounds of the market, an exuberant, self-important present below his window—felt the huge empty rush of time that spilled all things away. Aztira had promised that in Moih he would meet his father. This had taken place, but there was no meaning to it. Rehger had been a peasant’s get in Iscah, he had been a Swordsman in Alisaar. Those lives were gone, as was the life of Amrek.

He did not go that morning to the exercise courts of the Academy. He walked slowly toward Marble Street, and reaching it, beheld the sun rising over the eastern slopes of the city. The stone-shops along the lower concourse were already active. He could see the smoke, and hear the beat of drums where they were “serenading” the scored marble to make it split by vibration. Less than two years, yet Moiyah was well-known to him, as if he had dwelled here longer. Small, she could have fit inside Saardsinmey like an egg in a dish. Yellow amber, for the rubies of the west.

There was a cessation in the drumming. A bird sang from a garden. He thought of Chacor and Elissi, waking in their love-bed, and, for a moment, of the scent of a woman’s white hair against his mouth, across his arms and breast.

Rehger turned his head and looked up the street. The sun was spearing between the buildings, flashing on some bronze-work in the square before the hall of the Artisan’s Guild. The bronzes were the chosen pieces of those who, this winter, had earned the guild wristlet. There were only five of them: There had been many dozen disappointments. At first, like a boy, he had gone every day, to look at his success, there among the four others, the sun gilding it for glory.

It was the length and height of a wolf, the ancient prescribed measurements, raised on a five-foot plinth. A chariot and team, racing at full stretch. You were warned to work from what you knew. He had had no model, which was audacious and foolhardy, Vanek assured him. But memory, he had had that.

The group was faulty, far from perfect. Even the cast had been too ignorantly ambitious and revealed as much, after the bronze cooled. Nevertheless, it was enough to win admission to the guild. It was enough that, three days after its erection in the square, ten offers had been made for it. And a month later, sixteen more. “You do understand,” Vanek said, “some men always bid on principle for the winners.”

The Charioteer, among those who had an interest in artistic events, was however much discussed. For ail the flaws, it had essential quality. Being static—yet it moved. The hiddraxi, leaping, were one thing, like the shapes of a breaking wave. The chariot had a weightless buoyancy. The man, his hair bound back and clubbed, just the side-locks streaming, leaned into the speed-rush of the team. The reins, like astral filaments, poured from his grip into the animals’ hearts, the wheels were wrapped in winds. Grounded on its plinth, the assemblage was half in the air. Only a racer could have done it, the connoisseurs had said. Vanek did not say, They want to buy as they awarded the wristlet, because of what you were. The guild was not a charitable institution. Vanek had already mentioned that.

Rehger had modeled for the Raldnor statue some weeks before he took up a scoop of warm wax one dusk and pinched out a figure from it.

Mur had left his pumicing and gone into the yard to oversee the oven. The lamps were lit, for it was a stormy evening. Vanek came from his room and looked, and said nothing. Rehger compressed the wax into a blob, and put it down again. Vanek said, “You’ve made such figures before.”

“As a child. There was mud enough. The sun would bake them.” He did not add that then his uncle would come and kick them to bits. Vanek went back into his room.

When Mur no longer needed Rehger every day, he obtained similar employment without trouble at other studios and shops in the vicinity. Several of these were less exclusive and more populous than Vanek’s, but to stand near-naked, eaten by eyes, was hardly novel to a Swordsman. Only once had it been unacceptable. Arriving at the venue, he had found neither students nor draftsmen, but a small party of wealthy mixes without a stylus or calliper between them. Despite this, he stripped and got on the dais for them, and did nothing else until one of the women came to stand by him and to run her hands along his ribs and thigh. Then he quietly descended the dais, dressed, and left the studio.

Mur, seeing him interested and apt, was by then giving Rehger tasks to do, the rougher portions of rubbing and polishing, the upkeep of the fine utensils in the forge. When Mur rested, never while working, he lessoned Rehger in his art, demonstrating this and that, praising the young man’s quickness and ability. Mur noticed that once he had been shown what was done, Rehger seemed able to do it. Mur confided in Vanek. Rehger, coming on this scene, as if in the theater, said with no preamble, “I’ve been saving my pay. Will you apprentice me. Master Vanek?”

“You’re too old for such an apprenticeship,” said Vanek. “You’ve seen my other boys. Lads of ten and twelve.” Then he waited, head to one side. He was a cranky man, Vanek. He could use his tongue for a whip or a dousing of cold water, but he rescued flies that fell in the warmed wax, he hoarded sticks and lamp oil, and gave away the limestone off-cuts free for winter fuel to any at the door who asked. Rehger therefore, seeing the tilted head, the waiting, said, “You start them young to build the muscle. I have mine.”

“Agreed,” said Vanek, “you have at least the back and shoulders for the job.”

“But even with what I can pay you, I’ll be in your debt over the cash.”

Vanek pulled a face. He pointed to the afternoon work benches that the students had not yet returned to claim. “Go and make me something.”

It had been clumsy enough, a wax wrestler on one knee. The wire armature was improperly secured and an arm fell off at Vanek’s persistent jabbing.

“Fearsome,” said Vanek. “We must teach you to do better. But, as I told you once, you’ve done this before.”

“As a child.”

“You forget,” said Vanek, “we Lowlanders, we believe all men live quantities of lives.” He spoke scornfully, as if holding up religion like fouled cloth, between finger and thumb. “I meant you did it in a previous existence, my tall Lydian of Iscah. Then. So it will only be a question of remembering. Mur will help you remember. Mur has doubtless also been an artisan over and over. His very soul is warped into that shape.”

He did not not consider their religion. Even on the lips of his lover, Rehger had not heeded it. Even so, the craft of the sculptor came to him as Vanek said, like a slow sure remembering, flowing in wild bursts, or shut behind mental walls that must be hewn away. And once, cutting the “skin” from weathered marble, in the yard, with the rubble of marble all around him and the texture of marble in his pores and under his nails, and its flour tasting in his mouth, he recalled how he had fought through the debris, pulling up the blocks and tiles, at Katemval’s house on Gem-Jewel Street, finding wrung water-fowl and a girl’s body, a favorite chair miraculously intact, the gush of the wave having set it floating, empty. And in that minute, in Moih—but hovering out of place and time—it had seemed to him valid that the touch and smell of the marble did not seem to anchor him to destruction, rather seemed to reach quickly away from it back to some older hour, older that was than his body, heart, and mind.

But the minute passed from him. And he let it go.

Yennef pushed a way through the courtyard of the Amber Anklet, to the table under the vine. It was noon, and the Dortharian already there, as he should have been the night before. He looked up, and lifted the corners of his mouth.

“What detained you, Yennef?”

Yennef sat down.

“My own question exactly.”

“Really? Til go first then. I stopped to have a woman on Love Street. She was a very tempting woman. Very blonde and very tender. Despite this, I tore myself from her arms and arrived at our meeting point only half an hour in arrears. You, however, failed me. I kept faith till midnight. A grievous waste of time.”

“I,” said Yennef, waving over the wine-server, “was also prepared to wait until midnight. Then I was kidnapped.”

The Dortharian watched him, through iron-colored eyes. Apart from short stature, these were his only show of Lowland mix, but unnerving enough in the brazen darkness of his face. (When they unearthed the gray-eyed bandit king on the Plains, Yennef had been reminded of Galutiyh Am Dorthar, but not for long.)

“Kidnapped. By whom?”

“No one important. A wedding party. The bridegroom was a Corhl—that soldier I told you about, who slew my tirr for me on the Plains.”

“So then what?”

“Nothing. I joined in the wedding, and couldn’t leave until the sun got up. I assumed you’d be gone by that time, and went to sleep it off. Noon was your second choice, and here I am.”

Galutiyh sipped his drink, a vintage of Vardath, sweet and rosy. He said, “What a fibber you are, Yennef. Why dissemble? You slunk off with a young man. I never knew you had those tastes, but so what?”

“You followed me.”

“I had someone follow you.”

“After all these intimate months, you trust me so well.”

“Sensible, it would seem.”

“Anack’s gilt tits,” said Yennef. “He’s a son of mine.”

Galutiyh gave him a prolonged kalinx’s stare.

“My, my.”

“A by-blow, nothing more. But he’d tracked me down—being a friend to the Corhlan bridegroom.”

“Wanted to know why you had dishonored his mother, where the heirlooms were, that sort of thing?”

Yennef shrugged, and drank his wine.

Galutiyh linked his hands behind his head. He said to the sky, “Is it that I’m stupid, or that he thinks I am, or that he is, or that the Dream of the goddess has curdled his brain?”

Yennef did not answer this. He was used to Galutiyh, or had tried to become so. Instead, he responded with, “Down at the dock, I heard some of them discussing a quake in Free Zakoris. The ships brought the word, from Thos. But it may be exaggerated.”

“I know about the earthquake, Yennef. A paltry quiver, to a man of Dorthar’s capital. It’s this other thing I know that’s on my mind. Can it be that you’re attempting to shield him—this lover-son of yours?”

Yennef called the wine-server again. When he had had his refill, Yennef said, “My sons are in Dorthar. This one—there’s no bond between us.”

“Aah. And that is why you know nothing about him. Did you even inquire his name?”

“I know his name, yes.”

“And so do I, Yennef. Rehger the Lydian, a champion slave-Sword of the Alisaarians. Saardsinmey. A rare survivor.”

Yennef put down his cup.

“You’re aware that I’m less concerned with these supposed sorcerous occurrences. I was hired as a political hound.”

“In Dorthar, the political and sorcerous aims of the Amanackire are always considered jointly.”

Yennef, who had been to Amanackire Hamos, and got in the walls of ice, and next out again, not much wiser but a deal colder, was conscious Galutiyh had also gone there, and returned with all his superstitions in fresh trim. “The antics of the weather, and the quakes, the volcano and the wave at Saardsinmey—are necessarily alarming,” said Yennef appeasingly. “I see them as figments of a general unrest. Omens.”

“By which you mean you dismiss the Power the Children of Anackire claim to wield. History displays you are wrong.”

Galutiyh was a fanatic. It was useless to protest. It was indeed Galutiyh’s proximity which had kept Yennef from resigning his post as Dorthar’s agent and spy. You felt that for Galutiyh’s partner to renege, however honestly, would be grounds for Galutiyh’s cleanest knife in the throat. Most of two years they had been roaming now, paired like felons on a great length of chain. Neither had garnered much, for the Lowlanders of the farthest southern Plains were odd, and the ones in Moih only human, full of business and family, so if they had secrets they must keep them even from themselves. As for such bastions as Hamos, unless you could overhear their perpetual within-speech, what could you hope to learn?

Galutiyh was rising from the table, sleek and urbane. He was not much older than Rehger, but not so heroically made, and not as tall as the son or the father. A devout worshipper of the goddess, there was still a twig with red paper leaves tucked into his belt—they were to be had at the Anackire temple here. Galutiyh made sacrifice once every nine days. Not in rapture, which was the only reason for offering in native Moih, but out of dedicated respect. In the wilds, Galutiyh even would catch rats and snakes and make blood and burnt offerings. True Dortharian piety.

“Come with me, Yennef, my dear. I’m going to show you a wonder.”

Yennef had discovered that argument must be saved for extremes. He got up and went after Galutiyh.

“And as we go,” added the short Dortharian, “I’ll tell you a tale to knock two inches from your backbone.”

The fictitious persona in which Yennef traveled Xarabiss and the Lowlands was that of a merchant’s agent. Having been partly robbed of his camouflage at the Dragon Gate, he restocked the wagon in Moiyah and set off for Hamos. During this short journey, his nervous Xarabian servant vanished, and thereafter Yennef did not bother to-replace him. Galutiyh meanwhile, entering Moih a season behind Yennef, settled himself in, in his own way, and built up for himself over succeeding months a coterie of paid underlings.

It was one of these, lurking at the Anklet, who saw Yennef abducted by a Raiding Party. Much later, loitering at Arn Yr’s house, the watcher beheld the re-emergence of Yennef with a solitary companion, and dogged them to the Dusty Flower.

Something about Yennef’s companion advised the watcher not to try much more. And since he did not want to get too close, he was unable to decipher any dialogue. Instead he risked an old stratagem on the wine-shop doorkeeper. “I’m off. There’s a fellow in here I think I know. I owe him money.”

“Who’s that, then?”

“The tall one in the corner. The younger man. He skinned me at Xarar, only I never settled my account.”

“No fear,” said the doorkeeper. “I know that man. He was never in Xarar. He’s the Alisaarian, Rehger.”

“No, I tell you it’s ray beggar from Xarabiss.”

“Have it your own way. But I know it’s Rehger. He was a gladiator and charioteer, and he lived through Saardsinmey. You go up to the Artisans’ Guild and have a look at the bronze he made. A chariot and hiddraxi. They say he’s a find, that in a year or so he could be the best in the guild. Go on, you go and see, and then come back and say you owe him money.”

All this the underling duly reported to Galutiyh.

Galutiyh, who kept abreast of artistic doings, had already visited the bronze-work. As it happened, he had put in a bid for it, for his instinct was developed, and he, too, had caught the fragrance of rogue genius. Applicants to enter the guild did not give up their names publicly with their work. The Charioteer was accredited solely to an “Apprentice of the Studio of Master Vanek.”

Galutiyh, as he now promised Yennef, had started like a cat-snapped pigeon on bringing the two segments of information together.

Yennef looked at Galutiyh stonily.

“He told me his name last night. And that he got out of Saardsinmey.”

“But nothing else? And didn’t a distant harp-string twang? Can I trust you, Yennef my dove?”

They were in the square now, before the guild hall, and the five bronzes ranged about them, blinding in the midday sun.

“Here it is. What a group! I must have it now. I’ll instruct my man to raise the bid.”

Yennef looked at the bronze which his son had made. He saw only that it was very fine, then something else cut suddenly at his heart. Flesh of his flesh, which he had met with and parted from, had created this. The knowledge of whatever he had been, and was, his youth and manhood, his blood, his ancestry—had gone into it. Yennef reached out one hand, and the curved necks of the hiddraxi were under his palm, the chariot wheel, the shoulder of the charioteer. The metal was hot from the sunlight. It seemed to thrum and murmur like a hive of bees. It was alive with Rehger’s life. With Rehger’s life which in turn Yennef had created.

“Now Yennef,” said Galutiyh, “come out of your trance. We’re going to the studio of Vanek.”

Yennef let his hand fall away into the quiet air.

“You’re saying my son is connected to that insane Shansar hocus-pocus you’ve been suckling on.”

Galutiyh beamed upon him.

“Yes, dearest one. And you never thought of it till now.”

“Leave him alone,” said Yennef.

Galutiyh sauntered away down Marble Street.

As ever, perforce, Yennef would have to go after him.

The studio shop was vacant, and the cabinets secured. In the offices beyond two clerks were furtively eating a pie at a desk.

The studio, a huge room lit by braziers hanging from the rafters and vanes of glass above, had a dim glaze on it of various smokes and dusts. Only a little darker than milk, a naked girl model lay on a couch before the unlit hearth, conversing with some unmoved students. The farther wall gave on a courtyard where a large oven was fuming. Slabs of stone stood about there, but activity had ceased.

Galutiyh mused on the girl who, indifferent by now, ignored him.

“Rehger,” said Galutiyh. “Here?”

One of the students looked around and pointed to a stair.

Galutiyh, followed by Yennef, ascended. Some doors ranked along a narrow landing, through one of which came the soft rasp of pumice.

The Dortharian opened this door and put his head around it.

“Ah,” said Galutiyh, and jumped in.

Rehger looked up, and saw a man had come through the door. He was Vis, there was no mistaking it, yet he had temple leaves in his belt. He leaned on the table, looking at Rehger.

“Tell me, where did you learn to do such marvelous work?”

Rehger remained where he was, beside the small block of whitest marble he had been polishing. From the door it appeared formless, a slender oblong, only breast-high.

“Fm apprenticed to this studio, which is Master Vanek’s.”

“The Plains?” The visitor was surprised. “A long way surely from home? You’re from Dorthar, are you not?”

Rehger had seen the second man, in the doorway.

Rehger said, “I’ve some Dortharian blood.”

“Yes, by all means be quick to claim the High Race of Vis. Where else, then?”

“Alisaar. Anyone who knows me will tell you.”

“Saardsinmey.”

Rehger said nothing.

“Killing men,” said Galutiyh, “it was good commerce? And now you’ve found your father, too. What exciting days you’re having. Would you care to cap the adventure and go journeying?”

“Why?”

“Why indeed. Because I say you must. That’s how I earn my fame. My unerring sense of the quarry.”

There was a bellow of thunder directly overhead. It shook the partitions of the room, and past the window rain broke like a thousand necklaces from a cloudless sky.

In the moment of inattention, Yennef came across the cluttered space, picking up one of the razor-edged tools left lying there. He took Galutiyh around the body from behind, squeezing him close, and laid the flat of the chisel against his throat.

“Unfortunately,” said Yennef, to Rehger, “this one means what he says. But if you’re swift and stop for nothing, you should be away before his rat-pack dig up the body.”

Galutiyh had relaxed against Yennef.

“My body, eh?”

Yennef sensed the slight shift of tendons and said, kindly, “Don’t. After all, if you don’t force me to do it now, I might relent and spare you, later.”

“But he,” said Galutiyh, “isn’t running like you told him to.”

“Now,” said Yennef. “Rehger. Go. Get on a ship, or get out of Moih at least.”

“Shall I explain?” said Galutiyh. “You see,” he said to Rehger, “the white Lowlanders, the Shadowless, the pure Amanackire—the allied lands believe they are hoping to war with us again. And your special white lady has some part in it, being one of that kind.”

Something in Rehger altered.

Yennef said, “Don’t listen to his crazy spewings. There’s a story out of Shansarian Alisaar that a white Amanackire was killed in Saardsinmey—and rose from the dead. Her lover was a Vis Swordsman. She saved his life by sheltering him in her tomb above the city. To this mathematical cobbler here, if you’re a Saardsin Sword and have survived, then you must be a lover of the Amanackire woman. He’ll gather his pack and hound you to Dorthar or some Shansar or Vardish holding, and put you to the question. The Shansars call this process the Ordeals. Make your own decision on what that means. Go on, get out. I’ll kill this leech. I’ll take care of it.”

“Your father loves you,” said Galutiyh. “He knows our masters will punish him in due course if he does any of that.”

Rehger came around the table. He said, to Galutiyh, “I’ll take the chisel from him.” And with a movement like flight, almost invisible, sheered the chisel from Yennef s grip and undid the Dortharian from his arm.

Yennef stood amazed and cursing. Galutiyh, spun aside, sneered at them both.

“I won’t forget your charity, Rehger Am Ly Dis. Nor yours, Yennef, you cat-sput.” He flung lightly through the door and away down the stair.

“You deserve all he can do then, you bloody fool.”

“Perhaps, Yennef. It’s not a story, the tomb I sheltered in. Go and ask Chacor, if you like. He was there.”

“And no story dead women come back to life?”

“She could heal the dead. No, it may be nothing more than a fact. But Td like to hear what they say in Shansar Alisaar, for myself.”

“You will. On the rack. Over the fires. The yellow Shansarians—Vardath, Vathcri—are as frightened as the Vis, now, of what Lowlanders can do. We’ve been trying to weed out the opinions of the south, these merchants, because the Storm Lord, who has the peerless blood of the goddess himself, wets his drawers whenever you say Anackire, They don’t fight with weapons and men, the Lowland magicians. But with earthquakes and storms and tidal waves and cracking volcanoes. They can fly in chariots up to the stars, and murder with a flame from the eye or the fingers. And you played thread-the-needle with one of these. Anack help you. You should have let me kill him.”

“He didn’t owe his death to me, or to you,” said Rehger, absently.

“Lowlander talk. Repayments for past lives? Debts for future ones?”

“Yennef, in the arena sometimes, I’ve recognized the men who came to me for death.”

“She taught you the philosophy in bed?”

“Or it was blood-lust then. Whatever, I’ve killed sufficiently. You’d better be on your way before your Dortharian returns.”

“Yes, he won’t forget, as he said.”

“I regret that. Don’t think I don’t thank you, Yennef. You shouldn’t have risked yourself.”

“You’re my son,” said Yennef. He grew calm and said again, slowly, “My son. My first-born, so far as I know.”

17 The Dark. The Light

“We’re looking for an Alisaarian.”

“I have a message here, which he entrusted to me.”

Vanek, standing composed and alone in the studio, offered the five mix cutthroats a square of reed paper. “To Galutiyh Am Dorthar, or his captains: I shall await you at the fourth hour of afternoon, in the square before the Artisans Guild Hall. No other will be with me. I am, in readiness to accompany you, Rehger Am Ly Dis.”

Could they read? One, apparently. He repeated the sentences to the others. Then, “He’s a trained fighter, what about that?”

The most unsightly of his friends remarked coarsely, “There’ll be ten or so of us. Let’s see him try.”

Another objected, “Who’s to say he’ll do what he says?”

“We’ll get him sooner or later.”

Nevertheless they wished to search the studio and Vanek allowed it, having earlier sent every additional person off the premises. Subtly controlled by the aura of helpful aloof uninterest which Vanek exuded, Galutiyh’s search party did not make much mess, and soon went off again, into the city, whose streets steamed still from their slake of rain.

Rehger’s slightly longer letter to Vanek had rendered apology, and enclosed a sum of money (which annoyed, it was the full compensation for terminated apprenticeship.) “If I can ever redeem this, I will do it.” But he had seemed to imagine the imperative summons which now called him away might not allow of return. He thanked Vanek, and declared thanks, as apology, were inadequate. “If I might stay, I believe you know I would do so. It’s impossible.”

Vanek, hazarding between the lines, his latent telepathy questing, arrived at that strange nexus of the random psychic, sensitive of everything without even a phrase to describe it or a shred of proof. Therefore he emptied his studio, and awaited those Rehger regretted might be visited upon him.

There had been a third paper for the Corhl. Vanek, not scrupling, slit the wax and read favorable wishes to Chacor, a farewell, a suggestion that Chacor might be wary of telling anyone the real details of past escapes in Alisaar: It seemed the white Lowlanders were coming to be mistrusted.

The onslaught of rain had unsettled the city. Out on the avenues, the voices were still complaining, and awnings being shaken.

Vanek, having bolted and barred the studio doors, went up the stair.

The unfinished marble was in its accustomed position, and veiled in its cloth as Rehger always left it. More than a year, Vanek’s Lydian apprentice had worked on the stone, constantly refining and smoothing, only sometimes prizing a little of the material away. He had selected the piece himself, and split it off under Mur’s instruction—not to gain dominion over the stone—but rather to liberate some psyche trapped within.

Vanek, rather as he had slit the wax on the third letter, now raised the veil.

From the door, the marble’s progress was not visible. But coming around the slender block, you found the mystery had begun. A face, an exquisite throat, a fountain of hair, had been assisted from their chrysalis.

The silver maidens cast at Sheep Lane had had something of this. Yet they were beings in loveliest slumber. Frozen in her marble, this creature was at the threshold of wakening. A beautiful unhuman girl, drawn from hibernation in the melting snow, all whiteness, skin and hair and eyes, like a woman of the Amanackire, the Shadowless Ones, resurrected out of the winter ground.

The whiteness of Hamos—Yennef had pictured it extensively that afternoon before the fourth hour.

It was a black city, built of local stone; white marble came from the north, and they did not use it, there. The whiteness was in furnishings, the jewels, the garments, the albino pigment of the citizens. It was uncommon to see any Lowlander about in Hamos now darker than the palest blond. More often, you saw the golden eyes, but not so often as the eyes of ice. Snakes, too, abounded in Hamos. They were carved on pillars and lintels, worn in enamel on necks and limbs and waists. Or, they were living. They eddied from crevices in the walls and paving to sun themselves. There was a penalty at Hamos for any Vis killing a snake. The amputation of a finger from the offending hand. (This was a witticism. The hero Raldnor had been missing a finger.)

You saw Vis in Hamos, but they were always traveling. There were only a handful of inns that would shelter them, and only particular sections of the city where they might go. For those who wished to worship Anackire, the temples had an outer court and slab without a statue. It was the rumor there were no icons of the goddess any more in Hamos, and her sister sanctums. They formed the image by power of will, out of the fires they burned before the altars.

The Plains generally did not seem pledged to the fears, now rife elsewhere, of Amanackire militance, and even Hamos did not. Hamos was not of the world. Though there were said to be occult colleges, they were concealed, and if sorcery was positively practiced they gave no sign. Even the Shansar magics and the Vathcrian magics current in the goddess temples of all the Middle Lands, and of Var-Zakoris, Karmiss Lanelyr—were lacking.

Having written three letters, Rehger went directly to his lodging. Yennef walked beside him. They had agreed, unspoken, to end the discussion of alarms and tortures. Yennef had plans to avoid Galutiyh, but did not speak of those either. Rehger had other arrangements to make before departure.

In the succeeding hour then, they exchanged geographies, and a few insights of their separate lives, which was more than had been managed at the first meeting. It no longer seemed stilted to them to remain together, but neither was it natural.

“The artisan’s wristlet will be handy to hide the snake mark. They still curse Amrek in the north.”

Yennef had drifted into the service of the Council of Dorthar. He had done so many things, none of which had left any milestone. Long lost was the excursion among the mountains above Ly Dis. He had picked up the tale which sent him there in several forms, and repetition more than credence had driven him after it.

“It was suggested an Amanackire flying chariot had crashed there, on some upland valley. You’d even hear this from Vardish soldiers over the border, when they were drunk enough. I know, I served with them. It was a hoary old fable and had got itself adopted. A magician’s chariot of the skies, mind you. Winged, maybe. Dorthar has something of that sort, too. The dragons who carried the Vis to earth and made them kings. Well, it wasn’t that I believed in it, but it seemed the tree of falsehood might just have a root. I wanted to make my fortune, chance on some treasure trove. Months I went up and down those gods-forsaken crags. Then I found the treasure. Tibo. But never any chariot.”

No milestone but one, Yennef thought then. Flesh and blood. All the wandering and the deeds had been self-defeating. Years like dice thrown away. And now the milestone itself—Rehger—would throw in his own game. Because he had fancied a Lowlander girl, once, and so been snared in yet another legend, leaky as a sieve.

But they had been through all that. Yennef did not protest again. (His own father had been full of experienced admonitions, on the rare occasions when they spoke.)

The Lan made his exit from the apartment house an hour before the Lydian did so. At parting, each man grasped the other’s hand. It was a mockery of gesture, but they could not sustain any other. At least they had done that much. And his mother’s dead. I wont have to account for him to her. Yennef thought wryly: To no one, for anyone.

Rehger seated himself on a bench before the Artisans Guild Hall.

After the rain, the afternoon had redoubled itself and blazed on Moiyah. The sky seemed blasted of color, and white slices of heat and blackest shadow checkered the square.

There was the same feeling of similarity, or re-enactment, which had come on him at Vanek’s studio, when the Dortharian pranced into the upper room.

As the brass bell of the guild rang for the fourth hour, Rehger saw a lone figure walking toward him in slow easy strides, and whistling.

But no, the steps were feline, and over there, under an arch, ten or so of Galutiyh’s riff-raff were waiting with zeebas.

“Rehger,” said Galutiyh, in astonished delight. “Rehger of Ly Dis.”

Rehger stood up, and diminished him.

But Galutiyh, having gone about with Yennef, would be used to that.

There was a coast road northward, to the fort and the border. The soldiers used it, you could see both ways for miles.

The mendicant pot-seller therefore, on his skewbald zeeba, did not himself attempt the road until Moiyah’s gates were being shut for the evening.

Yennef, who had tossed clues to his fake purposes all over the city, had no idea of trotting over a skyline and smack into the Dortharian’s arms. A little before midnight, however, from a coronet of brush and thorn, he did have the charm of seeing the camp-fire only three hundred paces away at the roadside.

“Honey dreams,” said Yennef to the twisted soul of Galutiyh asleep. And felt two decades slip from him, as if he could go back.

But there was only forward, up the mountain and down, and it was a shame that Tibo had grown slack and dry, had wasted and died, in Iscah.

When the dark came, Vanek woke. He had fallen asleep in the chair he had brought in, across from the unfinished marble. It did not seem so very late. Bright windows shone beyond the window of the workroom, the noises of the nocturnal city had a soothing constancy. A night like any other.

But the white stone glimmered on the dark, tantalizing him. Having seated himself to ponder it, he had slept.

Vanek put himself out of the chair (seducer, not even comfortable), and lit the glass-topped lamp in the alcove. Bearing it back with him, he let the light and shade play upon her, the white girl in the ice. But the murmur of inner things was gone. He had slept, and not kept hold of it. How simply the body could divert the intellect.

And now, only a speck of fire fluttered like a bee on a marble face.

Vanek drew up the veil again, as Rehger had done, to protect his work from how much dust now, and how long a neglect?

The light in the lamp dipped, steadied.

Vanek thought of a nursery rhyme of Moih:

Blow out the lamp, Where is the flame? Light the lamp, There is the flame. Flame, flame, How is it so—Where do you come from? Where do you go?

Elissi would teach that to her children, no doubt. He had seen her, nine dusks before her wedding, going with a willing Chacor into the Anackire temple, to offer.

Flame, flame, how is it so?

Each life budding forth, withering away. But always, always, struck into another spark, to burn up again inside a lamp.

Flame, flame—

Knowing his stair, and all the house, miserly, not needing any light, Vanek blew out the lamp.