Any Vis, or man of dark enough mixture, was from the twelfth year eligible. Or vulnerable. The levies were taken by demand, where necessary by force.
In Amlan, and the towns, a public exhortation was employed. All suitable candidates were ordered to report to the local Karmian station. Those who did not give up their sons or themselves and could not buy exemption, received a visit from Karmian soldiery. A parcel of carpenters’ lathes were chopped up on the cobbles, a chain or so of extra zeebas appropriated by the military, a few score beer jars smashed. That was normally enough to set an example. Youths and men arrived at the recruitment centers and became part of the Lannic militia. The lit Torch emblem of Lan was displayed over each makeshift barracks, under a great scarlet Salamander.
To civilization’s outposts—the little wild villages swept across the uplands, through the bowls of valleys—Kesarh’s troops proceeded and merely took. Men were dragged from their fields or out of their beds, and hauled, stunned and roped, toward a soldier’s life, leaving their women and children to wail and perhaps to starve behind them.
One witnessed such sights on the way south. In the north, rumor said, it was worse.
As the Vardish caravan came down toward the borderland of Lanelyr, it skirted a burning village. Out on the hill a couple of women had been raped to death. Several men, too old to interest the levy, lay about broken. Other women and livestock were being herded away to pleasure and feast Karmian warriors.
The Vardians refused to intervene. Not much, in any event, could be done. The Karmians were many. The dead were dead.
Beyond the scene, those mountains which were the spine of Lan, stood blind against the sky.
In Lanelyr, in the guardian’s house at Olm, Safca was dreaming. In the dream, a Lowland girl stood at her window, with a golden moon behind her head. Come and see, said the girl, but without words.
Safca approached the window with diffidence. She had never thought to meet the Lowlander again. Safca looked where the girl indicated, and noticed her window had a vista in the dream it did not have in actuality, looking out on the great mountains beyond the town. A huge snake was winding up the hills toward them, glittering. Then she saw it was not a snake, but streams of lights.
“Where are they going to?” Safca asked the Lowland girl.
The Lowland girl told her.
Safca was disbelieving, incredulous.
Then she saw that on the mountain tops the golden moon had become the shape of a luminescent woman with a serpent’s tail. For some reason, Safca laughed with delight.
When she woke she was still laughing. She found she knew the Lowlander’s name.
There were only fifty of King Kesarh’s soldiers in Olm. Two stone houses had been given them—the occupants had fled. Their captain had required quarters, for himself and his most immediate officers, in the palace. The levy began on the first morning, and the guardian himself went into the marketplace and instructed the Olmians to cooperate. Karmiss was aiding Lan toward a proper self-defense that was surely needed. There was no rebellion. The influx had been expected for days, and Olm’s population grown even smaller from the resultant exodus. Those who were left had already given in.
The Karmian captain was pleased with the guardian. The Karmian captain now shared the bed of the guardian’s legal and prettier daughter. The man made frequent proud allusions to his rise to power from lowly and insalubrious beginnings on wharfs of Istris. But the guardian’s legal daughter offered no objection, even seemed inclined to show off her lover.
Yalef, the guardian’s eldest son, had run to Elyr with a pack of gambling friends and some acrobat girls.
Safca, catching the blaze of the Salamander lifted above the palace gate, remembered her old anger at the men of Shansar and Vardath, her inchoate wishes for Vis valor to return. Here it was. She writhed with shame and disgust.
There was another reason. Discreetly offered, by her third brother, her own person for the duration, one of the Karmian sergeants had said, “The bitch is all shanks and no breasts, and where’ve I seen that face? On a jug without handles.”
She daydreamed of killing the man throughout the evening. Then, asleep, she dreamed of the Lowlander, the mountains, the lights, and Anackire.
In the morning, anticipated nowhere and with nothing to do, she considered the dream.
There had been, along with the chatter of the Karmian invasion, more frivolous tales of Lowland magic on the Plains, flower-garlanded crowds emanating from the black ruined city, lights and manifestations. One story, brought by a trader, had held Olm’s marketplace agog. Wolves loped with these mystic bands, it seemed, harmless and amiable. And there were snakes, naturally, wound round them with the flowers. Safca, recalling the great snake the Lowland girl had given to her, that she herself might be wound in it, had trembled. Was it that the girl had reached the Shadowless Plains and there led these occult revels? Was it that the girl, telepathic and powerful, had sent a vision to Safca?
Why? It was madness.
At length, Safca summoned the dream-diviner, a toothless crone who dwelled in a hut near the town gates that no one had held against Karmiss. Years before, the crone had interpreted a dream to Safca. Safca had never been sure she accepted the verdict. The woman heard all kinds of gossip, and was clever at guessing. Now it seemed she had guessed some other thing, and fled; she was not to be discovered.
It had been quite apparent where the lights of the dream had been going, even if the Lowland girl had not told Safca. At the heart of those mountains lay the ancient kingdom of Zor, rarely visited, difficult to come at over reeling passes, which in the cold months were inaccessible.
An almost faultless refuge.
Something bizarre began to happen to Safca. It was like a low sonorous vibration in her blood. She did not know what it was. She realized she had felt something of it in the vicinity of the Lowlander.
Now, Safca listened to the thrumming of her soul behind her bones.
All at once, the room where she was seated began to go. She was frightened, and called it back. But the voiceless harp string thrummed on and on.
Outside, the Olmish conscripts were being drilled in the square. A Karmian officer with a stick lashed them when they faltered, like slaves. Some days ago, one had been brutally whipped.
Down below, her sister chirruped, plying the Karmian captain with candied fruit. The two Corhlish monkeys, who were afraid of him, whimpered in a corner.
Safca became aware she was seeing and hearing things that were not to be seen and heard, physically, in this room.
“Ashni,” she whispered. That was the name of the Lowland girl. It had been left with her, and this had been left with her, though she had not known.
The room wavered again.
With a pang of terrified elation, this time, Safca let it go.
The veiled woman at the door of the makeshift barracks was carefully examined for any weapon. The two guards who examined her were very thorough and joked, enjoying it, telling her to enjoy it too. If it had been Zastis, she would have had more from them. They did not bother with her covered face, but probably would not have recognized it. Her bribe they accepted graciously. She had not been foolish enough to wear any jewelry, save the plain little necessary luck bracelet on her left wrist. To go in and entertain her man for the night seemed quite a sensible request. Such things had happened before.
The low stone hall into which the woman picked her way, the door of which was bolted behind her, contained two thirds of the recruited Lannic army of Olm, about two hundred men.
Many were elderly and should not have been involved, sport for sadistic Karmian leaders. Some were very young, children. Some were merely soft, unhappy, and a few of these lay weeping. They were all the fodder of war. But there was a core of men, itinerant hunters, wagoneers, builders of houses, even Olm’s own guards, strong men lying awake in anger.