He had forgotten the Zakorians also.
The bluish storm sun went down behind his left shoulder, but he did not note it. Black monkeys with faces like white butterflies watched from the terraces of the boughs sixty feet up. He saw a mask, half black, half white. He saw a man with black hair, and a black pearl.
There came to be a particular shadow, very tall and dense. While he did not recollect it, he sensed acquaintance.
The palutorvus shambled between the trees which, at some juncture, had relieved it of the blinding hood. Too long a captive of men, it grazed the sap-laden leaves, sighing, lost.
When the smaller creature advanced, the palutorvus turned to it, expecting guidance, the goad or the sweetmeat: Order. It had been trained to bear men, even on its back, and despite the smart of its blisters, it soon kneeled. The man did not mount it for some time, staying beside it, touching it. But then the man did go up on to the great back, catching at vines to aid himself.
The palutorvus rose with a feeling of calm, appeased.
Some conceivably involuntary pressure was interpreted as a command.
Riding the primeval beast, the madman slept, dreaming still the mosaic, and the moon filled the forest.
Days and nights were swilled from the world.
The beast moved onward, sometimes pausing to graze the foliage. The madman, too, grazed on the leaves and grasses. Some were fragrant, others musty, or bitter, and these he spat out.
He saw a blue enameled snake embracing an indigo tree.
He saw the sun, and believed it had wings and was a child. Or the moon, and it had a boy’s face and closed eyes.
Sometimes there was water, and he drank, and the beast sluiced up the water and bathed both of them.
He felt its sadness. He pitied it. But he did not know he felt pity.
Days and nights.
It seemed he had lived for hundreds of years.
The madman dreamed he was on a river. Someone cut him with a knife, a shallow cut, and the cut healed. But then he was cut again. And then on the sixth day—in the dream—there was a challenge.
He had no password; he simply stood looking at the three men, seeing them with more than his eyes. They breathed out oaths at the color of his hair, which—in the dream—was nearly white. They told him they would take him where he wished to be.
When he woke up, the madman laughed.
The palutorvus grazed the leaves.
They had come over five hundred wandering miles and did not, either of them, know it.
And they went on.
Rarnammon, hero and king, had built a city in Thaddra once, but it lay in ruins.
The jungles clung close to the valley where the city rested, and had entered its streets. It was a white city but the jungle blackened it. Its name was lost. In forgotten antique tales, Rarnammon, whose own name had, in the beginning, been only Rarn, called it for his birthplace. Which was, depending on the version, Mon or Emon, or Memon.
It had, for centuries now, been the lair of thieves and outlaws.
Tuab Ey, sprawling like a cat to soak up the sun on the high roof, shaded his eyes and began to credit what he had taken for an illusion.
A piece of the jungle-forest was indeed progressing along the wide pale thoroughfare thirty broken walls away down the slope. But it was not, after all, a fantastically moving plant. It was a shadow-beast.
“Look, Galud. What is that?”
Galud, unhandsome, as Tuab Ey was not, scowled from under their awning of sacks. Galud was sun-shy, for he had Tarabine blood, but he had also the long clear sight of his unknown sailor father.
“By my half-wit gods, a palutorvus.”
“I thought,” said Tuab Ey, “such beasts were all extinct.”
“Farther south, the swamps’re full of the things. The Free Zakorians use them for dray-animals.” Galud and another man spat, as even Thaddrian cutthroats would do at mention of Zakoris-In-Thaddra.
“It looks big,” said Tuab Ey nonchalantly. “It looks as if it’s coming here. Shall we run away?”
His men laughed at the ritual idea of their young leader in retreat. He was junior to most of them, but fierce as a kalinx. Pretty as one, too. Tall and slim, he had a lot of Dortharian mixed in his genes. His bandit garments were tattered, revealing a compactly muscled cinnamon skin that had collected only a handful of thin and seemly scars. The raging noon sun on his hair found copper—there might be a Lowland strain somewhere, though his eyes were black as the trees beyond Rarnammon’s ruined city. The earring in his ear was new. It had been carved from the tooth of a man, a Thaddric freak nearly half again his own height, that he killed in a fray in a town to the north. The freak had been friends with a petty king of the region. Tuab Ey and his men had prudently departed.
Galud said, “There’s a fellow up on that monster’s back.”
“I thought so,” said Tuab Ey.
The palutorvus, ambling through a crumbling arch, knocked down most of the wall on either side. It came into a garden, once the pleasance of princes, and began to eat the vines. The man partly lying on its back seemed unconcerned. He did not glance their way. He could not be of their kind. Each renegade holed up in nameless Memon established his territory. Only two days ago, they had fought a rival pack of robbers to keep this tottering palace. The dead bodies, all the interlopers’, had been flung down a handy dry well, over there in the garden where the palutorvus was feeding.
Tuab Ey was leaving the roof.
Galud, and the other lieutenant, the One-Eared, fell into precautionary step behind him.
“Your animal is grazing my pasture,” said Tuab Ey, looking up the long hill of the palutorvus, to the man on top. “I trust you’re going to pay me.”
“Tuab,” said Galud softly. “Can’t you see? He’s crazy.” Tuab Ey had begun to consider it. Thaddrians tended to be superstitious of madness—the Smitten of Gods was what they called the insane. But the Dortharian sophistication of his father made him only scornful. Scornfully, then, even as Galud and the One-Eared affected religious signs, Tuab Ey shouted up the length of the beast: “Are you getting off, or do I throw a stone to knock you off?”
Then the man turned and looked down at him.
The madman’s hair, which was black and curling, reached his shoulders, and he was thickly bearded. The sun had been searing the rest of him very dark, but he was not one of Yl’s nation. Unless Free Zakorians ever had gold eyes. Even here, there had come to be a wary respect for the yellow races. Their goddess could rise on mountain summits to terrify Her foes. With luck, a lot of luck, She might destroy the Black Leopard of the Zakorian-Accursed.
“Well,” said Tuab Ey. “I’m waiting.”
But his tone was more dulcet. The madman’s Lowlander eyes disconcerted him. A thing he was not used to.
Then the madman altered his position. The palutorvus, taking this as a desire to dismount, which perhaps it was not, kneeled impressively. The madman, taking the kneeling in turn as an enablement to dismount, did so.
The watchers were struck by his limber strength. He had the grace of the professional fighter, and they recognized it at once.
Standing before them, he was taller than Tuab Ey, therefore taller than the others. Even covered in human dirt and the debris of the forests, he was imposing, well-made, coordinated. The loin-guard was familiar to the One-Eared, who had inadvertently served a month with Free Zakorian slave gangs. The thief muttered this knowledge to his leader. But his leader seemed not to hear, only staring at the madman. Finally, Tuab Ey said, “Give me that wine.”