Vencrek said, “My lord, I know some of the legends, too. The lines of energy that supposedly cross Vis. The line shot from the goddess temple above Koramvis—to Vathcri. I hazard you mean to meet the Leopard’s ships on that line of Power, as near as your theologians and cartographers can judge it.”
“Then, that’s your hazard.”
Vencrek turned, posed, had his suavity again. He said in Visian: “I see. Well, I’m probably all error. I know you leaned to the life of a sacerdote when a child, my lord, and still do. But you’ve never been sufficient idiot to throw Dorthar away for it.”
They spoke of military deployments.
Only at the door did Vencrek say, very lightly, “Of course, you’ve left no heir. What’s to become of us all if you go down?”
“Amrek left no heir,” said Raldanash. “The goddess provided one.”
Now, in Thos in the moon brightness, one recollected a workshop in the hills and the making of a crescent bow, and a ten-year-old Vencrek running through the waist-high grasses, yelling, waving the bow. And the terraces up to the temple, the cool enamel of live snakeskin, the shadows, and: “When you’re King of all Vis, what’ll I be?” “My Counselor.” And Vencrek frowning, “But I want to fight, lead your armies.” “The wars are over,” Raldanash had said. They had agreed, that being the case, Counselor was best.
Later Sulvian glided across the moonlight, her white hair blowing, but it had merged with some imagery of his father’s, some telepathic symbol lodged in his brain at birth. For Sulvian crumbled into gilded ashes and blew away along the night.
The elegant ships took wing with the morning.
They sailed southward, the crenellated shore always visible on the left hand: Steep-shelved Ommos, the plain-lands of Xarabiss, where watchtowers sent up flowers of blue smoke. There was a mild following wind.
After twenty-five days, the Storm Lord’s fleet came into the glassy water between Xarabiss and the borderland of Alisaar and Old Zakoris. Here, a cordon of Xarabian and Dortharian-Vathcrian vessels had been stationed across the sea, between garrisoned watchtowers on either coast. The original plan had chosen a point farther south, where the sea channel was narrower. But Alisaar’s withdrawal from alliance had made her unacceptable as the western end of this oceanic rope. Nor was the chain mighty. Twenty-three galleys maintained it, equipped with such war machinery as could be spared. The two garrisons were of similar bulk. It was a last-ditch measure. Success elsewhere and the element of surprise would favor it, but if most if Yl’s force swept into the channel, the cordon had no hope, save to delay.
Beyond the northern edge of Alisaar, the sea spread wide again. Xarabiss melted away in a sunset cloud as they turned southwest toward the open waters of war.
It had taken the Thaddrian most of two days to clamber through the rubble and into the uplands beyond. Rising, winning through, these had touches of allegory. Gradually the plains city of Anackyra, its martial show, its multitude of soldiers, the apathetic fear of its citizens, vanished. Within the shambles of Koramvis there had been halts, to rest, to search about. There was no longer any sure way over the wide river, but he found a little raft, some native robber’s, perhaps, and rowed himself unchallenged to the farther shore. That side there was the “Merchant’s Road” a path for travelers coming from the mountains, a project begun and abandoned before it reached the southern bank, falling itself in disrepair.
When he broke out of the lawless damaged loveliness of the ruins, the hills opened like honeycomb on either side. A great bird flew up before his coming, then loomed above him on broad wings.
The sun was just going down and the evening was limpidly gathering all about, when he saw below him the dragon’s eye, Lake Ibron, like a pearl.
They had not gone up to the temple, or where the temple had been before the quake threw down the hill. They sat almost indolently among huge grass-grown boulders.
He saw at first glance Lowlanders, a fair Xarabian, one Vardish man playing dice with another, and the forms of two small red Lannic sheep questing in the grass for clovers. Standing up against the sheet of soft light that was the sky, were Amanackire, like a snowy grove. They stared at him, gods disturbed. But the Thaddrian looked past them, and seeing what he had come to find, he went to her.
He did not obeise himself. She was a part of the goddess, to whom he knelt only in ritual, never in fact, for that was not the proper way.
She told him, without speech, that he should sit.
He sat before her.
The lake, the light, bloomed at her back. Composed and pure as an icon, her symmetry was exquisite. But what pleased him most was her complete approachability. And that in the midst of a totality which seemed to alter the very air. In just this way the most valid things were come to. The sky itself, the sea, the world, magnificent and charged with meaning—a child might gaze at them and read them like an open book. This was the verity of Power.
He was the only sheer Visian there. The idea that he had been invited began to make a strange sense. It was a balance. In a short while, he produced from his priest’s robe a square of cloth, and opened it on the rock for her. Inside were pieces of a shattered amber ring. Sparks of the sun were startled in them. Even the Amanackire came from their eminence to see.
The Thaddrian, who had watched Raldnor and Astaris ride away into the forests of the north, was something of a psychic hound. This talent had enabled him to know Rarmon who was to be Rarnammon, and long after, to track Rarnammon’s path to the spot in Koramvis where enemies had taken him. The ring, shattered, had been abandoned. The Thaddrian had gathered up the bits carefully. It was not that it was a labor Ashni had set him, more a labor he wished in some way to perform for her, and which had therefore been allotted. Even on the Plains, there were sometimes offerings of fruit, or carvings, left for the goddess. She understood it was sometimes difficult, in moments of great joy, not to give thanks in concrete terms; the giver’s need, not the recipient’s.
Ashni drew the shards of the ring into her palm.
A woman now in the Zor had worn this ring. Ashni had worn the ring. Rarnammon had worn it. Another, the son of Yannul, had held the ring, though it burned him. A link of flesh and resin, still bonded.
The pieces were all in place now, all but the pieces of the ring.
The last ray of sunlight coiled through them, like a serpent. And then, the ring was whole, melded together, intact.
He heard their breathing, the circle of them all around, the sighs attendant upon miracle. But the Thaddrian grinned. And she smiled at him.
“Yes, you know,” he said to her inside his skull, without words. “I am the one says miracles need not be, for gods to be. And to this day I never saw any reason why Raldnor and Astaris shouldn’t be living in some lost thatched village of Thaddra, among those who didn’t know them. Ordinary, happy, obscure. I can speak the jargon of the priests—the transcension, the chariot of flame that takes the god into heaven. And to me, that’s so simple, so mundane. Miracles are nothing—the stuff of life. The flower blossoming, the invisible emerging from the womb—a child, resin turned into amber—miracles, nothing but miracles. But there’s the fact beyond the miracle. The stone under the silver lake. What we are and must become. That’s the reason and the perfect truth, and the answer to all the questions and the cries. Isn’t it, Ashni-who-is-Anackire?”
And the reply was given him, just as the ring glowed on her finger. And the sun bloomed still in her eyes, though the sun had gone down.
24