Darak was seated at the Warden’s right hand—the place of highest honor. By his side was a beautiful woman with pure golden hair that seemed natural though one could not be sure of such things in Ankurum. On the Warden’s left sat Gillan of Soils in his white, grinning to himself now and again, possibly at the irony of his position. I, as the archer who had taken the classic shot, sat beside Gillan, and Gillan was very wary of me, overgracious in a bluff, rough way, and silent for the rest of the while. Other charioteers and racers, and I suppose Gillan’s archer, ranged down the table, interspersed with the beauties of the Warden’s court. I do not remember any of them. To be courteous and appear to eat, while eating as little as possible, was preoccupation enough. I felt ill throughout the courses and was uncertain of the reason. The hall seemed burning and miasmic.
We sat along one side of the table only, and below us the other tables stretched out, noisier and less formal than ours. Barak’s men, the few he had brought with him, were in among that throng, guzzling and gnawing. I hoped vaguely there would be no trouble, for the Warden’s guard, as was usual enough at such a function, were arranged thickly around the walls, particularly at the Warden’s back. I watched his fleshy ringed hands neatly skewering his food. The pains began in my stomach.
I must leave this place. The thought came sudden and ice cold. At once I saw the room as though it had been frozen, paler, almost transparent. I forgot the dictates of etiquette. I was about to get up and say—I was not certain, perhaps I would simply run down among the tables to the door. But the Warden’s jeweled hand went up, a lordly flick, a horn sounded, and he rose. Comparative silence fell. He was about to toast the Victors. Impaled by the moment, I sat still and did not move. A sea of faces, nodding a little, touched gold by light, smiling, laughing, harmonious. The Warden lifting his silver cup again and again as the Speaker cried out the Victors’ names and towns, and the horn echoed him, and the shouts and cheers. And then the trained voice with its slight overemphasis, “Victor of the Sagare: Darros of Sigko.”
The great roar and clapping, the Warden bending smiling toward Darak. And then that fleshy hand, waving the sound gently down.
Still standing, the Warden lowered his cup to the table.
“Darros of Sigko,” he repeated, his rich voice carrying. “We know him well, do we not? The courageous merchant who brought his caravan safe to Ankurum, a feat unparalled—and then rode to win the empress of our races, the Sagare.” Cheers beat up like birds, and gently again he waved them down.
Smiling still, he leaned out toward the tables now. “And one more thing our Darros had done. He has deceived us all.” The silence grew closer. The Warden laughed a little. “The Victor of our Sagare is, in fact, nothing more than a thief, a murderer, and a bandit—Darak, the gold-fisher, the scum of the northern hills.” He turned to Darak and nodded. “Your little game is over, charioteer.”
The guards started forward from the walls behind us, ten men straight toward Darak. There was uproar below now, and some women were screaming. We had brought no weapons into the hall with us; it was not etiquette to do so. I could not seem to move. I saw Darak standing, leaning back against the table, grinning at the ten who had come to take him. I am not sure how I saw, for Gillan and the Warden were between us. I saw Darak’s hand reach back onto the table and pick up one of those toy golden knives they had given us—useless, it would bend, not bite—yet one of the guard saw that movement. The iron guard-sword licked out and forward. I heard Darak gasp. His hands fell to his sides. He looked at the man, almost lazily, his mouth still curved, not knowing quite yet that he was dead. Two guards caught him between them as he fell, hoisted him, and began to carry him out. They had been very quick, no blood even spilled on this golden table. Two of them had my arms, had had them, I realized now, since the Warden first spoke his accusation. They were pulling me up and away with them. I think they had put something in my cup, in Darak’s too; my legs were like heavy iron as they dragged me. And Darak’s men had been so quickly subdued in the body of the hall. Yet they had not kept it so tidy there. Ellak and another man lay dead. One guard was dying, several bloody. Women’s white faces stared at us as we passed, like a funeral procession, following Darak’s corpse.
His head hung back, the face very still, his mouth firmly closed, solemn now in death. His scarlet cloak trailed behind him.
Scarlet for the vine. Little doll-goddess, you took your offering after all, then—death for death, little goddess of the scarlet vine.
10
“Karrakaz!” I screamed down the black places of the mountain. “Karrakaz, et So! Et So-Sestorra!”
A hand clamped my mouth. I was shaken from one dark to another. Maggur’s eyes, red-shot in the gloom.
“Ssh, Imma, who do you call out to?”
Strange, he did not know the old tongue, yet he seemed to know what I had said. I lay quiet on the rank filthy straw of the prison room.
“What time is it, Maggur? How long now?”
He shook his head. “Sun looks low from the grating. Near sunset.”
There were other men in the stone chamber—all they had caught from the hostelry. Those that had been brought here before the feast of Victors, after their brothel brawl, we neither saw nor had any word of.
We had been here two days now, and to begin with they had laughed and jibed at the guard outside, throwing out bones at them from the door hole. They had told stories: “Yes, Slak’s lot got away, took a few pieces of these pigs’ hide with ’em, too.” Now their spirit was burned out in the dank black hole, stinking with their own excrement and fear. We were all to be hanged—publicly. And we were to go to it three a day. You were not sure when they would come for you, or who they would pick. The first time the three had gone with a salute and a swagger. Men climbed up to the grating high in the wall and saw them dangle in the square. The second time it was less bold, that going out. That second day, too, there had been a fourth man strung up. They had hung Barak’s dead body with the rest.
How the crowds had roared at it, in the square, loud as they had roared in the Sirkunix. Louder. Life loves to look on death.
A man at the window—I cannot remember who—spat out of the grating.
“On you, you sty of a stinking town.”
Yet I had not been dreaming of Darak, but of the Mountain, and I had run toward the altar crying, “Here am I! Here am I! The Accursed One!”
I sat up. My hair was tangled with the straw, and the red beads still hung in it.
“How long, Maggur?” I whispered. “Will they leave me until last, Maggur, because I took the classic shot?”
But it would come. The reins around my throat, the running horses. I would hear the crowd yell as they broke my neck.
Maggur put his great arm around me, and I leaned on him in the darkness.
The next day, the footsteps came at noon.
Door rasping, spill of ocher torchlight from the night-dark passages outside. Six guards, with drawn swords, and two jailers.
“Out. You, you, and the black one.”
Two of the men rose—one of them was Gleer. Maggur got up more slowly, his hand lingering on my arm. Gleer began to whistle, a brothel song; the other man made a little lunge at the guard that brought all their swords up in a knot, and laughed at them.
“Come on, you, the black one. You won’t be losing your girlfriend yet awhile, she’s coming too.”