Sometimes they fed him, and he was given water every day. Yl wanted Raurm Am Ralnar to live a long while.
At night when he railed at the moon, they had ceased taking the whip to him. He did not quiet. The only man who went near to try knocking him insensible—the madman had gone for his throat and bitten through the neck vein. The guard expired in minutes, hiccupping blood. Now, when Rarmon bawled they cursed him, but nothing else.
Fifty yards away, the tree tore from the road in a fountain of soil and stones. The palutorvuses stamped, and the prisoner in the cart lifted his head.
His eyes were yellow, like the eyes of the Lowland witch Ashne’e, his grandmother.
The Free Zakorians would have put out his eyes, but Yl—Kathus—had decreed he should not be maimed. It was said he would be paraded in the war, and must be recognizable to the foe.
The undergrowth along the sides of the road was to be burned off. Much farther south, in the choked valleys between the mountains that squatted by Old Zakoris, stretches of forest were often set on fire for clearing. An outpost of the Road was well-advanced there, mostly in order to alarm the Storm Lord’s spies. Between that area and this, the rampage of the jungles had been scarcely breached.
Rain was frequent at this season, and they coincided their fires. The deeps of the forests were never dry, full of exhalation and sap, but here in the opened places the trees would flare like kindling, needing some check.
The madman in the cart, if he had even noticed, had presided over two such ignitings and quenchings. The air first perilous with flame and flaming splinters, next the thunder, deluge, and dense strangling smoke. Thirteen days back, a bevy of slaves had been trapped among the thickets and burned, the storm too late to save them. If their screams evoked any ironic memory in the madman’s tumbling thoughts, he did not demonstrate. He stood silent in his chains, then and now.
They could not hope the swamp-giants would be so peaceful. Every palutorvus loathed fire. As the sky about the trees began to threaten, men had climbed up and hooded the beasts, smearing their hairy trunks with salve to veil for them the stink of burning. Now they were being fed titbits. The half-starved slaves were too resigned to look on with envy. Gangs of Alisaarians, Iscaians and Thaddrians worked this plot. There had been a gang of mixes, too, but they were dead. Men with the fair blood generally did not last long at this enterprise under this western sun.
The holy man who divined rain came to, and stood up, snuffling thirstily. He held out his hand displaying three fingers. “This much time, no more.”
The sky was swollen, seeming to touch the treetops. The Zakorians received their order and pounded along the slave lines. Men and women ran forward, touching bright tongues of light against the forest. Suddenly, like a wave, an invisible curling, soaring thing dashed up thirty feet into the branches. Charcoal fell. The slaves skipped away and bunched together on the middle of the track.
Birds hurled shrieking into the sky.
A white cicatrice of lightning slit the clouds. Timing, it would seem, had been commendable.
Thunder rang. The swamp-beasts shook their hooded heads. They were dumb and could not vocalize distress. They had, despite prevention, scented fire.
Walls of transparent flame reared either side of the road. The slaves huddled, offering prayers, groaning, while the holy man pranced, lifting his thin paws to heaven. The overseers began to swear in fear. For the rain did not come.
Thunder sounded again, directly overhead. Two lightning bolts crossed the sky and seemed to meet, exploding—somewhere in the forest a tree jetted into new fire. A blazing stem sprawled across the road. The slaves screamed and milled. The guards roared for the water barrels to be released, and struck out with their lashes, to little avail. A flash of water became steam as the fire drank it in.
Fire was everywhere. Even the sky was full of it—raining fire not liquid.
Retreating from the holocaust, a Free Zakorian stumbled against the madman’s cart. Looking up, he saw the dark golden eyes reflecting lightning. The Zakorian backed away. He remembered which line this man inherited, the very legend over his head proclaimed it—a Storm Lord.
Just then, between the terror of fire-forest and electric sky, a final night-black terror tore loose on the Southern Road.
Someone had been careless at the tethering. Now, savage with its panic, blind in the hood but smelling only conflagration, hearing only the gongs of heaven, the younger palutorvus had broken from its traces. Men scattered away. One not sufficiently swift was tossed, pulped like ripe fruit, as the mighty feet trampled over him.
Scorched, sightless, stupid with fear, the palutorvus bore on. Lightning stabbed into the forest. A white instant showed the giant beast, seeming massive as a mountain. Slaves jumped desperately aside, into fire, which for a moment seemed preferable. The only motionless impediment was the wedged cart and the man shackled within it.
The stampeding palutorvus hit the cart it could not see. The wooden sides burst apart, the wheels whirled across the stones. The cibbawood post bolted to the floor of the cart snapped away, catching as it fell between the monster’s limbs. It seemed Raurm Am Ralnar, bound to that post, would be trampled like the Zakorian. Something else happened. The chains, producing slack as the post was ripped out, had become tangled in the animal’s matted under-hair and the trails of rope which were the remnants of its tethers.
Unable to rid itself of this senseless thing, hung at its belly like weird young, the palutorvus veered desperately sideways, plunging abruptly off the road. The last of the cart disintegrated before it. Directionless and crazed, the beast drove against the very wall of the inferno, and parted it. Into the burning jungle, itself burning, the giant lurched, the post and the chained man dragged with it, and was gone.
When the rain began it sank in a heavy curtain. The madman lay beneath it, and let his body drink.
The animal which had carried him had rushed for many miles, a great voiceless engine. The mobile tent of its body had shielded him from the fire, the forest. And the jungle had given way before the animal, as the fire had ultimately given way. In the thick moisture-mist of the jungle’s gut, the incendiary lights had died from its back. Somewhere it had sloughed its burden, or the claws of the jungle had torn the burden away.
He had been stunned through much of the flight, by repeated blows, smoke, speed. Only now, under the downpour, did he recall he was alive. Then he turned on his side, for the rains of the north and west could drown a man on his back. He thought, too, to open his mouth and let it drink with his flesh and his bones.
The madman was yet a madman. For him, there was neither past nor present, and no future. His brain was all mosaic. Here an icon which was a girl, hair like rubies, here something like a black wall, and the sea beyond. Or there a merchant who was begging to be spared the blade’s edge. Or a silver coin, spinning. It did not irk him. None of it had a name, a start, an end, a purpose. None of it demanded anything of him.
But now, although he did not begin to reason, yet there was some sort of curious change. What was it?
The madman came to his feet and looked about through the shadowy forest, washed by rain as if by ocean.
When the rain stopped, he was walking. It did not concern him where. Sometimes he touched the trees, interested by them. Sometimes he touched his own face. His hands had been wrapped in chains, which were gone, all but some bits of metal still adhering, clanking about him, not constraining him at all. The madman did not theorize upon this. How the post, uprooted, discarded, had uncoiled the chains, and he, rolling from under the great beast, had uncoiled them further. The securing links had given way when the bolts in the cart did so. He had only needed eventually to crawl out of them, as out of the creeper under the trees.