The vague dusk shone through the man, and his hair was like frost. Because of that, they knew him.
Raldnor’s spirit?
His son.
They proceeded, a respectful distance in his wake. He was a King. But they did look for the tremulous cord that must anchor the psyche to the body during life, and believed they detected it.
Raldanash, in his psychic condition, did not wonder, although never in the past had he ranged so distantly from the body. Nor had he ever been strong enough to project his own image in tandem with his awareness. That power would come from her, her magnetic power, like amber.
He sensed the men behind him, and their ability to accept. But they were as ghostly to him as he must be to them. The world itself was ghostly. Only the golden flame burned before him, the flame that was the girl.
He had already learned, without tuition, all she was, or all that he could understand she was. The soul of Raldnor’s daughter in an envelope of flesh, older than the flesh, reforming the flesh so that it had hastened, growing to the likeness of a young woman, perhaps eighteen years of age. Her consciousness was older. Older even than itself, for she had in some way remembered those insights that the soul forgot beyond the spiritual places of its freedom. That she was also his sister he barely noticed. Of all the reasons to approach, it was the least.
Raldanash’s physical soul entered the shell of the tower. He glimpsed fires, men and women and animals. A few—Lowlanders—glimpsed him, and fell quiet. It seemed she must have wished for them to see him, it was no ostentation. So he passed through them gently, and going approximately to the twist of the stair, ascended.
The small piece of a chamber that remained at the head of the tower, open all round to the darkening sky, was softly brilliant with her light.
Ashni. She rose to greet him, and with an odd sweetness of gesture put her hands in his. He felt her touch, though he could feel nothing else that was real, save the silver cold and the flowing water of the wind.
Her beauty was not like his own, not like the beauty of Raldnor and Sulvian and Astaris. It was the beauty of fantasy, more than pearl skin and topaz hair. Her eyes were not eyes at all, but sheer windows that showed the lamp beyond. Her strength—Raldanash had read a strength like this in Rarmon, but there it was banked; events rather than will must unfetter it. The strength of Raldanash was dissimilar. Rarmon was a sword, and Ashni a sword of fire. But he . . . he saw it now. His strength was the mirror of bronze or glass, taking the sun’s reflection, multiplying heat and flame. He saw, and he saw the mirror blaze, and buckle, cracking, shattering. This, then, was the mirror’s fate. He would die.
Her touch gave him comfort. It was not that she was pitiless. She had told him only what he had guessed, long long ago, on the plains of Vathcri, the hills of Dorthar. Like a candle, some are given life to die, the proverb said.
For some reason he thought then of Jarred, his mother’s brother, consumed in the burning sea.
Ashni held him, and the terror ebbed. She began to talk to him, not in words, or even images, but in a manner that filled his vision, hearing and heart. And it was also true that in some way she revealed the past, so he beheld Raldnor and Ashne’e, Koramvis in her glory, and other subjects of a time before time, at which he marveled, and which afterward he mislaid.
In the end, he knew death as a little thing, and in the end also, raising his eyes which were the astral eyes of his physical soul, he was not amazed or discomposed to find Ashni as she really was, a summer being limned by gold, taller than heaven where the stars were branching in her hair, her eyes like suns, her plated tail coiled with a wonderful economy, the tower miles below them both: Ashnesea, Ashkar, Anackire.
But he employed words then, finding himself in conversation with the goddess. The first word was only: “Why?”
The answer blossomed in his soul’s mind. It said:
I am the symbol and the name. In Ommos I am Zarok. In Zakoris I am Zarduk and Rorn. Outside the world, I am all others. In sleep, the dream. Beyond death, the emblem of awakening.
“And what is that awakening?” he asked Her, though he had been shown already.
She answered: Yourself.
And in the Zor, Safca dreamed of a pillar of light which did not burn.
But in the Lowland city Lur Raldnor dreamed of a black monster and a red, and Rem in the midst of fire, and his face was a screaming skull.
21
Six miles from Ylmeshd the land rose into the southeast, a climbing hip of ground woven higher yet by the reeking, fuming jungle, blood-splashed with raucous birds and lizard-eating flowers. Here, even in the cold months it was never cold. And here, too, began that Southern Road which King Yl desired should one day, loaded with men and chariots, break through to Dorthar and Vardian Zakoris.
But it was a sort of fable. The road was made and the jungle reclaimed it. It was not likely it would see completion before the battle had been joined on other, more accessible, fronts. It served to scare the Dortharians and Vardians. It served to punish those who had displeased Free Zakoris.
Somewhere in the morass of the first twenty miles of Road, slave gangs were clearing the undergrowth.
There was stone paving here, which had been laid a pair of years before. Already it was split with seedlings. The slaves, naked save for leather loin-aprons, hacked and slashed, their salts pouring from them in the heat, and now and then scarlet threads, at the whips of the overseers. A fallen slave was kicked. When she failed to get up, she was slung into a ditch at the roadside. It was forbidden that the guards enjoy her, for she was dying and to waste procreative seed was unlawful. They did not bother to cut her throat; time would see to things.
Farther on, where the great ferns and vines had been torn up, human ants labored to replace cracked stones.
Farther on again, a tree had rooted in the road. It was roped, and the ropes extended through iron harness across the backs of two huge beasts, palutorvuses, giants from the steamy swamps of Zakoris, and the margins of Thaddra. One was rust-red, the other blacker than night. They hauled blindly, streaming hair like water, flinching from the flails and goads as at the stings of insects. Behind them the mighty tree creaked. A root sprang from the stones.
A little way up, in the feverish shade just off the road, other antics were in progress. A holy man, itinerant and perhaps insane, rocked in his delirium. He had divined the possibility of rain and was now courting it. The guard did not make fun of him. When they wished for it, they had another lunatic to mock.
The cart was out on the road, wedged by the boulders against its wheels. The sun slammed down on it, disguising nothing.
He had been howling earlier, but now seemed asleep. The head had fallen forward, matted with black hair and beard. The copper skin was welted and streaked by sweat and filth. The cart was filthy, too, despite the withered garlands still decorating it, and there were chips and scratches where the shards the crowd flung at him in Ylmeshd had missed their mark. The enormous weighted chains roped him round and round, binding him to the cibba post bolted into the cart. Pinned over his head was a piece of wood with letters branded into it. Not everyone could read them, but most could guess. I am Prince Rarmon Am Dorthar, Son of Raldnor Son of Rehdon. Behold my glory.
They had been beholding it nearly a month. Hearing it, too. He had a good couple of lungs. The words were gibberish. It was more entertaining when he thrashed in his bonds, unable to get loose. The smell of wounds and rage enthralled the Free Zakorians. This was what they would do to Dorthar as a whole, and to the yellow men who had shamed them.