For Zastis, there were countless graceful means. The short ride into Amlan was no bother, and her Pleasure City was lively if the Ommos Quarter was slight. It had been simple courteously to put aside Yannul’s offer of the three young servant girls at the villa, all of whom were willing and had eyed Rem since his arrival, with the tidings he had a particular liaison in the city.
Despite that, Rem suspected Yannul knew the pivot of his guest’s subterfuge. That the man did him the extreme politeness of reckoning Rem’s desires aside from Rem’s relations with Yannul’s son was impressive, and, of course, honorably obligatory. But he had promised himself to carefulness in any case.
Lur Raldnor had a girl from the next farm-villa. Her parents probably hoped for marriage with the son of the hero’s captain. The girl and the boy cared only for their nights on the Zastis tinder of the hill.
Now and then, riding back in the dawn from Amlan, Rem would meet him walking back from the hill. Raldnor seemed to consider this a conspiracy of sorts. Those were maybe the easiest times of all, and therefore the most difficult.
The practice bouts, the wrestling, the slamming together of blunted iron or wooden blades—or skin—in the yard, that type of innocent physical provocation Rem was used to. The labor, if it was fierce and difficult enough, brought its own relief. Nor, with the bevy of respectable women about, did they strip to fight. In real combat, as a rule, you had mail on your back and leg and arms; to learn to battle weightless in just a loin-guard could prove a disadvantage later on.
With the end of the Zastis months, Raldnor would be going. It was a long road to Dorthar, traveling via the Elyrian port of Hliha. Things were already half arranged. Letters had gone ahead, straight to the person of the Storm Lord, naturally.
Medaci gazed at her elder son, her citrus eyes more still than frozen tears.
One morning there were wolf tracks round the drying mud of the bis pond. None of the birds was missing. The animals of the farm had set up no warning noise during the night. Nevertheless it was thought advisable to pursue the invader. The wolves of Lan became greedy so close to the city, insolent thieves. One canny enough to avoid audible detection could prove a nuisance.
Yannul, who had been out chopping wood with his servants, now sent two of them to get ready for the hunt. The men were experienced in such affairs, grim but not displeased. Raldnor, seeing them start to saddle up, decided he was hunting that day rather than swinging a practice-sword. “Come with me,” he said to Rem. “You hunted wolves in Karmiss, didn’t you?”
Rem had, one whole long winter in the Istrian hills, hunted and eaten them, too. But for eight years wolves had come to mean something else to him, no longer adversary but terror, nightmare. And he had had the dream again, once or twice, at the villa, or on the pallets of Amlan’s Pleasure City.
Nevertheless, they got their zeebas, weapons, food from the kitchen, and set off, catching up to Yannul’s men on the hills.
The dog had the wolf-scent all the way, but it was a prolonged trial. By midday they were miles up and over the hills, with only one abandoned cave to show, and that quickly abandoned also by the wolf-dog.
The heat smote down. They entered a wood and stopped to eat in its shade. The two servants diced sleepily. Even the dog rested, its nostrils alert, but its eyes and tongue lax. It was useless to move on until the sun moved sideways off their craniums.
Where the wood ran down the hill was a wide brilliant pool. Before he quite knew it. Rem found himself swimming across it with the boy. The light meal was no trouble, but after a while each of them turned on his back, floating on the buoyancy, staring up through the leaves to the day and, blinded, shut his eyes.
“That wolf,” said Raldnor, “he must be somewhere near. We’ll come on him before sunset.” But then, “I never yet killed anything and liked it. The chase, yes. And it has to be done. But not to be liked. I’d suppose it’s that way, killing men.”
“Men are easier to kill,” Rem said.
“More stupid than a beast, do you mean?”
“No. But easier.”
After a long while the boy said, “To you, perhaps.”
Then nothing.
It would almost be possible to sleep in this water.
Presently Lur Raldnor, less life-weary, swam for the bank. Rem watched him, the tanned body like a stripe of gold against the darker stripes of the trees.
The responses of his own flesh set Rem swimming again, up and down, efficient clockwork. He had no intention of coming out of the pool, watched in turn, and the evidence of Zastis on him like a blazon. One could blame changes of temperature and element only for so much.
When he did wade out, Raldnor was lying on his belly, head on his folded arms, eyes shut again. Then, as Rem walked to his clothes, there came an oath worthy of the mess hall at Istris.
“—Anack! Who did that to you?”
“What?”
“There are whip lines across your back. A whip with teeth.”
Rem had forgotten. It was a long while since someone had thought to comment or inquire. Not since Doriyos. . . .
“Asleep on duty eight years ago, in the service of my King,” he said, startled by his own paraphrasing bitterness.
Without prelude, for he had not heard Raldnor stir, he felt the boy’s hand gracious yet firm against his spine. It was not an invitation, one sensed that. It was the magnetism of compassion. Before he could control the reflex. Rem shrugged him away. “No.”
“I’m sorry. It can’t still hurt you, can it?”
“It doesn’t.”
Rem dressed. Raldnor had stopped talking, standing naked at his back, clothed only in blamelessness.
9
Beyond the hill was another hill. You climbed it and there was another. They piled behind each other, and then there were the distant mountains.
Rem had gone back through the wood, nodding to the dice-playing servants, and away. He meant to give himself the half of one halved hour, then return. Things would be as they had been, then. Except, obviously, they had been this way from the start.
One of the mountains was moving. Like a great ship, it came sailing toward him, filling the horizon. The top of the mountain was smudged by a sunset many hours away. Lower, the hillside rock opened on a solitary ink-black nostril—the wolf’s lair? No, not that.
Nearby, there was a hovel in a wretched field. A woman came suddenly out of the hut. She seemed to see him; she waved to him and hurried up. She moved in a coquettish way, but, coming close, he saw her dirt, her age and her pathetic idiocy.
“Would you like to come in the house?”
The world exploded like a shattered mirror. Pieces of vision fell down.
“Would you like to come in the house?”
He could see again. He could see the mountains far off in their correct order, the light of primal afternoon on the hills. There was no cave, although there was a field, and a small cot overhung by fruit trees.
“Lord?” the woman said. “Lord?”
And the woman was still there. But she was hardly old, and not dirty. Her looks were plump and pretty, her black hair held back by a red scarf sewn with beads.
Rem looked down at her. Her welcome was unnerving. It was almost more natural when her face fell, lapsed into terror. She turned and ran from him, screaming.
Out of the hut burst a great brute of a man. As he raced through the field, the woman darted to him and he caught her, held her, glaring at Rem.