The One-Eared unhooked the flask from his belt. Tuab Ey, not taking his gaze off the madman, received the flask, uncorked it, held it out to him. The madman was a while accepting. Then he drank sparingly and handed back the flask.
Although he did not speak, he no longer looked mad, merely unusual.
“Come, then,” Tuab Ey said. His father had actually been an aristocrat absconded after some nefarious act in Dorthar. Tuab Ey now and then reverted to odd displays of breeding. “Be our guest. Follow us. Your—er, your transport will be safe enough here. I doubt if any of our neighbors will try to steal it. The meat, they tell me is awful.”
He walked off, and his lieutenants went after him. Sure enough, the madman followed.
In the great hall of Tuab Ey’s appropriated palace, sunset, then dusk, recolored the wall paintings. The ancient hearths were unusable. A fire leapt brightly on the smashed mosaic, its smoke going out adequately through the smashed roof. When it rained, the fire tended to perish.
The nights grew almost chilly in winter. Sometimes snakes or lizards stole up to share their fire. Tuab Ey did not let his men harm them; they amused him. Once a tribe of apes had got in. Tuab Ey, imitating the chief ape’s threat-behavior exactly, grunting and jumping up and down, had frightened them off.
Now Tuab Ey sat cross-legged, watching the madman, who sat himself a little apart from them and from the fire. He had been offered food, fruit and vine-shoots, and meat from yesterday’s hunt. He had eaten little, and none of the meat. He had been shown the cracked cistern in the courtyard, freshly full of rain. The bandits washed in it when they had the mind; Tuab Ey, the aristocrat’s son, bathed there every day. The madman got into the cistern and cleansed himself. One of the robbers they had slaughtered two days before had been tall and athletic. His clothes were offered the madman, who donned them, ignoring, or uncaring at the knife rent over the heart.
Now, dressed as a bandit, by a bandits’ fire, the madman who, perhaps, should have been at home with such things, regarded the air, seeing sights invisible.
Tuab Ey rose, walked to the madman, and sat down again.
“I’ve a razor and fat, if you want to shave.”
The madman did not respond.
Tuab Ey went on watching him.
One of his men said, “Tuab’s in love with the Smitten of Gods.”
Tuab Ey said, “Each to his own. Is it the frieze of naked girls in the fifth court, or the seventh, that you lie under and play with yourself?”
They laughed. They started to talk about women they had had, or boys.
When the madman got to his feet and walked out, they looked, but that was all. Only Tuab Ey, smiling at them like the proffered razor, went after him.
And like a kalinx, only Tuab Ey pursued his guest up and down the palace, over the ruined stairs, across the subsiding terraces. When the madman paused, so did Tuab Ey. And when he continued, Tuab Ey continued.
Rarnammon, said the stones of nameless Memon.
Rem, Ram, Rarmon, Rarnammon, said the heights and depths of the city at every window-place and balcony.
The wind soughed through the forest and through the vents of towers.
Rarnammon, said the wind.
In each chamber, the wall paintings came alive. He saw the orgiastic feastings, the women in their gauzes, the men with the leathers and draperies of another time, the chalices wide enough to swim in, brimmed by wine. He heard the moaning of unremembered instruments, and the love-cries of those who coupled on the cushions—sounds which never change. He beheld sacrifice to a dragon-headed god which grasped lightnings in its hands. He was witness to an army, marching like armored smoke through the boulevards of the city, war music clashing and the sunlight of ghost-day rebounding from spears and chariots. Rarnammon had taken the continent of Vis and made it one, every land of Vis bound in fealty to himself. He was the first to bear the title ‘Storm Lord’. Yet his eyes were Lowlander’s eyes.
The madman was Rarnammon. A golden-eyed Vis.
Tribute was brought to him, endless streams of men on their knees or faces, heaps of jewels, bars of metal, weapons, slaves—He felt the heat of noon on his skin in the chill of night, and the female kiss of silk against him, where the rough cloth lay.
“Storm Lord,” they said.
But he walked through a colonnade, and saw in at a window. A woman was rocking a child in a cradle, passionlessly, for something to do. And the child stared at her with an aloof distrust to match her own. It was Lyki. She was young, and the child was himself. And then he saw her again, in some other surrounding—a tent it seemed to be, and she clutched the child he was to her, hating him and in need. And someone had said: “If I were to say to you, Lyki, that I would spare your life on one condition, that condition being that I take your child and rip it open with this sword, you would let me do it, for this is how you are made.” And now that someone who spoke, who was Raldnor his father, said to her, “Your death would be useless. Therefore, you shall not die.”
And then it was raining, and he passed through the gate of the red house on Slope Street, in Karmiss.
It was not difficult to traverse the house, and reach the tiny anteroom and so the bedroom. The merchant was not there, out or away. Lyki lay in the bed. She was colorless, her darkness, even her dark hair, seemed drained to monochrome. She pleated the coverings with her fingers, her mouth turned in and down as he had always recollected it. For a moment she seemed flaccid, something cast adrift on the shores of life, soon to be reclaimed by the hunger of the sea. But then she caught sight of him, and she revived.
“So,” she said. “So. You steeled yourself, you put off all the more important things, and came after all. Well. I never thought you would. Money, yes. I thought your guilt and shame might drive you to that. But to waste your precious person on me. Well. I am amazed.”
He stood before her, knowing her. Still.
“Well,” she said. She grimaced, feverish with her excitement and her spite. “An honor. The Prince Kesarh Am Xai’s own henchman, and here in my bedchamber. Did you bring any more ankars? The physician’s no good. He prescribes this and that, but it doesn’t help me. He”—she meant the merchant, her protector—“has gone off to a tavern. He swears I make his own illness worse with mine. Well,” she said, “men have always treated me badly. And you, my son, you never loved me. Never.”
He moved forward, coming up beside the bed, and looked down at her. She was near to death, he had seen this expression on other faces, a concentration beyond her will on some inner perspective, which was death itself.
“You look older,” she said. She seemed suddenly afraid. “What has he done to you? How can you look older? At Zastis you were here, whipped, disgraced—for more than a year I see nothing of you and then you crawl to me, vomit on my floor, put me to difficulty and expense—”
“Mother,” he said. He spoke quietly, but it stopped her. Perhaps she had never heard this in his voice before. He himself did not quite comprehend it. Compassion, forbearance, but not pity and not hate.
And then she began to weep. The tears gushed from her eyes, and he wondered that she had the strength left to cry.
“I beat you,” she said. “You were wicked and deserved it, but I beat you. I should not have beaten you. I shouldn’t have hurt you so.”
“The Amanackire say. What we have done is the past; reiterate the deed, or dismiss the deed.”
“No. I beat you. I hurt you. I’ll be punished.”