Nevertheless, it was another midnight, another day, before he got his directions to the farm and rode out of Amlan toward it.
It was hardly just a farm, more a villa, built, he supposed, on Dortharian lines. The blue hills held it, as they seemed to hold everything of note in Lan, and mountains gleamed far behind in the ultimate hour of the sun. Orchards and vineyards clustered near the house. An orynx herd trundled grunting and splashing in a valley with a stream, zeebas peered from pens, and gray bis fled squawking and flapping across the outer yard, long ringed necks outstretched.
“Splendid,” said Yannul when they met in the coolness of the house. “We eat early here. You’re just in time.”
They settled the questions of routine and pay over the dinner table. Yannul’s Lowland wife, soft-spoken but shining in a dress the color of her hair, helped the two servants serve the meal, then sat down with the family. Lur Raldnor was away, on a hunt, after the wildcat that had been raiding the orynx herds of the area. A much younger son, all gold for his mother’s side save for his black eyes, listened and took part in the conversation without precocity. He had the exact sound blend of couthness and dash apparent in the older boy.
Yannul and Rem ended playing a Lannic board game on the terrace in the afterglow. When the light was almost all gone, Yannul joined his servants haphazardly in kindling the lamps. Up in the sky, the Red Star was also kindled.
As Rem won the first leg of the game, Yannul said, “And I take it your mother often struck you.”
Rem started.
“Excuse me,” said Yannul, “if that’s too raw. But I noticed you flinch when Medaci tapped the boy’s hand on its fourth trip to the fruit bowl. A joke, a love-blow, no more.”
Rem was discouraged at himself to have let slip so much. He said nothing now, and Yannul went on, “it’s a cruel time for her. She loves them both, but Raldnor’s her first-born. We never thought she’d bear, after the life she had in the old city, the Lowland ruin. For a long while she didn’t. And she and he, they’re like lovers, the pair of them. Not in the Lannic way, just love, you understand. If he goes to Anackyra, she’ll pine. Yet at the same moment, she wants him to go, to fight, to stop the creeping dark. And she’s afraid, too. We remember, you see, what it was like before.”
“And what was it like?”
“Oh, you want all the military history in a nutshell, do you?”
“You must be used to that.”
“Why else,” said Yannul, “am I hiding here? I had a year of war, and then a handful of years playing politician in Dorthar. That was enough for me. To return and be Lan’s heroic monument wasn’t my design, either.” A moth had come to die in their lamp and with great gentleness and the excellent coordination of the acrobat and juggler he had been, Yannul caught it and threw it lightly free, unscathed by flesh or fire, back into the night. “Raldnor had the best idea. He disappeared.”
“Why?”
“Why not? He’d done all that was asked. Lost his humanity for it. He was a god. Gods either transcend or decay. Or vanish. And he’d left a son behind him. Raldanash of Vathcri, now Storm Lord. There was another boy, too; the Dortharians played a trick with that one, or tried to. The mother was a fool and a bitch. It’s in my mind the baby died.”
Something cold passed through Rem. He pictured the wolves, tearing—
“And the last battle under Koramvis,” he said. “Witchcraft, earthquake, the goddess manifesting. Is any of that true?”
“Truth and untruth, woven as one. I’ll tell you something, about the Lowlanders. One can believe they’re not creatures of this earth. Not all come in that mold. Medaci doesn’t, and when we took the ruin back from Amrek’s dragon soldiery, I think she was all that stood between me and a kind of madness. I’d gone there out of pity, hope of justice, quite capable of killing in hot blood, and well-trained to do it. Then I found out the core of the Lowlanders.” Yannul’s eyes were sightless now, looking only back. “I remember passing them on the streets in the snow, after the massacre of Amrek’s garrison, these men, those women I’d come to save from tyranny. They were like silent wolves, eyes gleaming like ice—they looked unhuman. And I was sick to my soul. I’d never seen that in them before, but I saw it after. The second continent men, they’re not in that mold either. They’re blond Vis. But the Amanackire are only themselves. They’re in Xarabiss, Dorthar. You can see some of them, now, physically almost all whiteness—skin, hair, even the yellow eyes get pale—ice in fire and the fire going out.” Yannul smiled. “That last battle, under Koramvis. Through Raldnor, they’d come to know themselves, the Woken Serpent. And at Koramvis, Vis came to know them too. They caused the earthquake by power of will. Or maybe that’s false. It didn’t seem so then. They had to win, and the odds had become impossible. That army out of Koramvis—we should have been obliterated. So, if the victory must come and it couldn’t come from strength of arms or numbers, it had to be strength of another kind. They willed to live. We all did. It was like a prayer, the air so still for miles you could sense it thrumming like a dumb string plucked over and over. The only chance was a miracle. And the miracle happened. Koramvis fell. As for the goddess—yes, that happened, too, but there was a sane explanation for that.”
Along the ridge of the nearest hill there came a drifting whoop and sudden splinters of torchlight.
The hunters were coming home.
“Please finish,” said Rem.
“A statue,” Yannul said, “a colossus from a hidden temple in the uplands above Koramvis. The quake threw her in the air and she was big enough and bright enough to see even from that distance, through the smoke and murk. She sank into a lake below. Another deity wisely gone to ground.”
Half an hour later, Lur Raldnor came out on to the terrace with two wildcat tails, the frisks of the murderers who had been viciously killing but not eating the herds.
Standing with the lamp full on him he looked at Rem with unfeigned pleasure, and said, “I never thought you would agree.”
So glad to get this chance at Dorthar, Rem thought. But he returned the grin.
The fighter’s training was one of the easiest parts of it all. Rem had so trained most of the escort-riders in his employ, and himself kept up the exercise a soldier stuck to, if he was thorough, working out with his men where he could, or alone. And Lur Raldnor, hardy and strong, used to hunting and riding, and taught by Yannul from his childhood any number of acrobatic tricks, took to the work with ability, interest and sense. It was true, Yannul had been trained in Xarabiss, whose Academy of Arms, along with those of Alisaar and Karmiss and Dorthar, was universally respected. His tutor, moreover, had been a Zakorian sadist whose relentless lessons were of the best, when viewed in the long-term. Yannul modestly reckoned himself now past the best age for imparting acumen. But his son came to Rem far from a novice, needing burnish rather than welding.
The rest was easy enough. Too easy. The household accepted Rem like a limpid pool, closing over his head with scarcely a ring formed to mark his entry.
He found himself continuously at home in Yannul’s house, and strove to keep some part of himself aloof from home comforts and home intimacies. But he even liked Medaci. She was demure and unassuming, with a sweet smile. Coming out once on to the terrace, he found her with Yannul, the two of them standing hand in hand, his head bowed so their foreheads touched, like adolescent lovers. Nor, seeing him, did they break away ashamed, but separated gently, amused and friendly toward themselves, the discovered, toward Rem, the discoverer.