The Lowlanders did not shirk. They had triumphed before. Besides, did not the goddess teach that the soul lived forever? What odds if a man died in the flesh? Death was only the sloughing of a skin. Such philosophy had made them passive long ago, and now reckless, and pitiless.
Passing through the temple, he touched the goddess’ golden scales with his lips, loving the idea of Her, and sick and tired of men.
A distant storm, low and faint, murmured over the mountains. The transparent lightnings were thinner than watered milk, but now and then they would catch the surface of fluid—stagnant rain held in a broken cistern or some accumulative pool. On the river too, they played, lighting it as once the street torches had done, the lamps of temples and boats, and the tall windows.
Dead Koramvis, smashed in bits, lay at either side.
He had left the chariot back a mile or more, tethering the zeebas—he had insisted on zeebas for his journey, unused to the flimsy chariot-animals, not wanting to risk them on rough going.
Why he had come up here he did not altogether know. Now, with all done, maybe it was an urge to escape. His father had known such feelings, trapped here in his glorious disguise, Amrek’s man.
Rarmon had briefly wondered if he would know his route about the mined streets, Raldnor’s genes reminding him. But, considering the state the shock had brought it to, he doubted even Raldnor could have found the way to much.
Only the river, the Okris, was a sure landmark, smeared fitfully with the lightning. A huge bridge had fallen into the water. On the cracked and upheaved pavement, vegetation had had more than twenty-eight years of chance to grow. Here and there, some building still stood in portions, a tower, a colonnade—but the weeds and the vines and the trees had fastened on these too. There were wildcats lairing; he heard their cries.
When the wind blew, powder ran down the lanes, more than dust, the gratings of marble. Rot came from the river. Metal lay rusting. The whole city rusted like a broken sword.
He walked awhile, then stood and looked across the river.
When movement came, off to his left, he turned without haste, drawing his knife. He would have expected bandits to lair here, with the beasts. But the ring was burning. He hesitated. There was no threat, only strangeness. Beyond a shattered arch of pallid Vis stone, there was another arch like a shadow, also shattered, but black. Under the second arch, someone. . . . A girl.
He went toward her slowly. There was no need for slowness, he could not break the mirage, like a web.
All around it was night, but in the second arch, daylight.
She was not looking at him. She was drawing water from a well. Young, thirteen or fourteen years of age, lovely with her youth and with some other thing. Lowland hair and skin. When she had filled her jar, she set it on her hip. She raised her head, and so her eyes. And meeting her eyes in the mirage, which she had not allowed to happen in the corridor at Olm, he knew her and cried out, so the heart of the hollow ruin felt his voice.
13
A queen had ruled over it once, before the history began that was remembered. Ashnesea, from whose name such other names had evolved as Anici, or Ashne’e. It felt old as the earth. It had seen so much. The splendors of legend, the decline of its people, conquered or cast down, the persecutions of the Vis, the ultimate persecution by Amrek. It had been occupied, garrisoned by men who hated and feared both its inhabitants and it. Then a messiah walked over its black stones, and it saw the beginning of the overthrow of the Vis, the Lowland Serpent, waking. And the first strike of the Serpent’s fangs.
It was a ruin still, the Lowland city on the Shadowless Plains, and it had no name, if it had ever had one.
Through its decayed walls animals yet ran in and out, travelers penetrated and departed as they wished. Everything had changed, but it had not. Entering the undefended gates, one would still be overpowered by a sense of enormous age and enigma.
Haut had been intending to make for one of the two or three sizable Lowland towns now flourishing on the Plains, even Hamos, maybe. Then, lying in his tent at Elyr, waiting for the girl to come in and pleasure him, he had considered, if she were good, he might keep her for himself. He would free her first, of course, so there would be no irregularity to annoy the Amanackire, binding her only by love of him. Then she had come in, and he had seen her hair, and her eyes, and next the Shadow of the goddess.
When he regained consciousness, she was gone. He went out, shivering, to determine if she had ever existed. His servants and the drover slept, but she sat by the guard kalinxes, watching the sheep.
He went over to her and when she did not deny him or strike him dead, he kneeled to her and begged her pardon.
Thereafter she rode in a cart with an awning which he purchased at the next village. Sometimes, he asked her what she wished, but she only smiled. However, the smile was enchanting, and considerably better than a flung levinbolt. In the dust, her shadow was now only a girl’s. His servants, Vardians like himself, respected her blondness currently revealed, and assumed his care of her was prudence, prudently copying it.
To Haut, the ways of avatars were familiar from stories. The Lowland War had occurred before he was born, but was recent enough for the new paint on the tales to have stayed fresh. It was still an era of wonders. More than unnerved, he was excited to be included in it. In Vardath, too, where priestesses walked and talked with lions, and the telepathy of near kin was fairly frequent, it was simpler to remain easy with the prodigies of faith.
Crossing into the Lowlands, Haut became aware of their destination. She did not tell him, he merely knew. He was a little disappointed, for the ruined city offered scant business to him, and, he would have thought, scantier fame for her. But it went without saying he obeyed.
He did not warm to the city, standing darkly brooding in its shallow valley. That was no surprise either. But numbers of people still dwelled there, and that was a surprise. There was even a venturesome Xarabian quarter, intent on trade. They had revived one of the marketplaces, and re-awarded it its antique Lowlander name of Lepasin. The houses round about had been shored up and repaired. It was the most cheerful area of the ruin, giving more than a semblance of life, and here the Vardian took rooms looking out on the market. On the far side of its terraces, two arcane palaces kept one in mind of decay, but the rest of the slope had gone to grass. The last of Haut’s sheep could be pastured there, and sheltered in the overgrown courts by night.
With the day, women began to gather at the ancient watering places, carrying their jars, lending to the morning a further normalcy.
There were still many of mixed blood in the city. Not so long ago it had been their only refuge, when they learned they did not suit either with the Vis or the pale races. The true Lowlanders for the most part were gone—to Plains towns such as Hamos or Moiyah, or away into the Vis world now wide open to them. Those who remained here were of that outer kind, pure of blood, yet more tender of spirit. They were many, but proportionally few. The Lowland people had found themselves. Mostly, they were not as they had been. Or rather, they were exactly as they had been, eons past.
When the girl appeared in the Lepasin, the groups of the industrious and the idle made way for her. Even here, deference was paid to the Amanackire, and from her coloring she could be no other.