15
All night long he heard the oars crooning in the water. They had for him the sound of death.
The boat was a narrow, shallow sea-skimmer carrying oil and iron into Zakoris. Raldnor slept, as did all the occasional passengers, under awning on her deck.
The crossing from Dorthar to the Zakorian port of Loth took a day and a night, and the day had been full of his own hope, his own sense of searching, because he had known at that time that she lived, and he had heard of the wild stories in Koramvis. Astaris had not used poison. Powerful friends had got her away, and where else should she fly but to the secret wilderness of Thaddra, which so often had swallowed up men and their histories. And Raldnor himself had a need of secrecy and hiding.
Kren had financed his passage through obscure routes of Dorthar in the dying glare of eastern summer, and from Dorthar to comparative safety in the west. From Zakoris he would travel over the mountain chain into Thaddra. To Kren his debts were numberless; he would repay them when, and if, he ever could. But he had been made to understand that neither repayment nor guilt were expected of him.
As to what he had lost—a mythical throne, a power he had never dreamed before was his—after the first turmoil, it had seemed unimportant beside that need, that tearing rending need, to find Astaris.
The sun sank, twilight clouded the sea. An hour after twilight he felt the almost imperceptible presence stir and slip softly out of his brain. No violence this time, as with the white-haired girl; this was a quiet, serene death—the black sleep came gently on her, for all it was final. But she left him empty.
And this was what he felt in himself—not anguish or pain or a compulsion to weep. Only emptiness. It seemed that in leaving him, she had taken also his soul.
Dawn came, and Loth. He left the ship, but no longer with a purpose.
Beyond the harbor was a broad stinking fish market, and threads of cobbled streets slippery with oil; at their back were clamorous jungle and the black treacle of the swamp.
Raldnor sat through the morning in a steamy hovel where wine and meat were sold. Runny-nosed children banged about the place, and two Zakorian soldiers glared silently at their own thoughts.
At noon he joined a caravan of Ottish merchants. They were traveling to Hanassor, the capital, and they made a great noise which somehow dulled the emptiness in him. He was afraid to let them go, to remain in the humid silence of the town, immobile, with his loss.
On the uncertain jungle road they chattered and sent up clouds of birds screaming in alarm.
After three days they took to the bridges and causeways that crossed the swamp. A foul black stench hung in the air, and the colors of the jungle were distorted before his eyes.
The swamp fever fastened on him with a steady and inexorable grip. By the time they had reached Yla he felt so ill, he thought he would die.
He lay in the dark hot inn, and a physician was sent to him—either by one of the Ottites or a Ylian, fearing plague. He was a smelly old skeleton in an animal skin, probably some journeying holy man, but with sharp, bright eyes and teeth. He stared at Raldnor and said: “You were ill not long since. I tell you, the god of death sits on your shoulder and you must shake him off.”
“He’s welcome to me,” Raldnor said, but he drank the poisonous medicine. He thought in any case that he would die in the night, and was glad of it.
He dreamed of the cave temple above Koramvis, but the statue there was no longer of Anackire but of Astaris, a creature of enamels and rubies, with cold, unquickened eyes.
In the morning the fever had left him.
The Ottish caravan had left also, unable to wait on his recovery. So he was trapped at last in his limbo with despair.
He walked about the ramshackle town, stopping at leprous taverns with walls the color of yellow vomit, asking for news of traders going in any direction. Everything he did was the act of a sleepwalker, his relentless searching quite meaningless.
At noon, exhausted, he sat like an old man on a stone bench in the square and watched the Ylians. Soon the square emptied, leaving only the great slices of white heat and black shadow and the monotonous screech of birds from the surrounding jungle. And then came a lone figure on foot, walking in slow easy strides and whistling.
Raldnor observed him—a brass-burned man with shoulder-blade-long black strings of hair—with no interest as he came nearer. A few yards off he came to a sudden halt.
“By all the gods and goddesses—”
Raldnor glanced in his face.
“Raldnor,” the man grinned, showing his salt-white teeth. “Raldnor of Sar.”
“I beg your pardon,” Raldnor said stiffly, “you seem to know me, but I—”
“Yannul the Lan. We served together, you and I, under the yellow fox, Kathaos Am Alisaar. There, you know me now. And I can see that you must be the sick traveler who came with the Ottish caravan. You’ve a look as though the goddesses took you out of the oven before you were properly baked. And some trouble too. Do you still serve Amrek?”
Raldnor shut his eyes and gave the briefest of smiles.
“I should imagine not.”
“Well, we get little enough news of Dorthar in this place. . . . And you look as if you make room for a mug of black beer. Come with me. I know a halfway decent inn—”
Raldnor opened his eyes and looked hard at him.
“Why should you want to share my company, Yannul of Lan? Ryhgon broke your hand at Abissa because of me.”
“As you see,” Yannul said, “he didn’t make a good job of it. I healed. And besides, you paid him back for me in full, I heard. The taverns of Abissa were noisy with it.”
“You heard from the taverns, too, that I became Amrek’s man?”
“So I did. It was a good joke, though I doubt if Kathaos laughed.”
“And now,” Raldnor said, “having exercised my good fortune too far, I’ve fallen from favor utterly. Because of me, a woman has died. The second woman to die because she loved me. And I, Yannul, am an exiled man, without home or hearth. If I were recognized, I should be killed immediately, without trial or any kind of nicety. You should be more careful who you drink with, my friend.”
“In Lan, Raldnor, we judge a man as we find him, not by what he tells us he’s done. I’ll be glad enough to drink with you, but if you find me wanting since last we met, then say so, and I’ll leave you in peace, you Sarish fool.”
On the flat roof of the inn, under the black awning, it was cooler and almost deserted.
They drank at first in silence, but near the end of the first jug, Yannul told Raldnor what had become of him in Lin Abissa. Wandering about the midnight city streets, sick and delirious, he had finally propped himself against the courtyard door of a house in the merchants’ quarter. Here two girls discovered him—the householder’s wives on their way home from a supper party, as it turned out—and they expressed at once a wish to keep him. He was nursed back to health by a skillful physician, who later informed him that, as a bonus, his master Kathaos had also had him poisoned.
“My iron constitution had luckily expelled the muck along half the gutters of Abissa,” Yannul remarked, “and the old man’s drafts ensured my survival. Don’t let it trouble you. You see I live and breathe.”
As for his hand, the physician had set it faultlessly—at the absent merchant’s expense. The two ladies, it seemed, thought a lot of him, and he soon found himself repaying them by service in their beds. Hearing, however, of his unwitting benefactor’s imminent return, Yannul prudently took his leave.
He secured work on a ship bound for Zakoris, and thereafter labored at various occupations until he took up with an acrobatic troupe. They were of little ability and a quarrelsome disposition, and, having spent a few days with them on the road, he decided to desert in the first town, which turned out to be Yla. Here he toiled at the ledgers of a timber merchant, accruing enough coin to buy a passage to Alisaar. Zakoris was too stern a land for Yannul, though he had no plans as yet to return to his own. But in Alisaar jugglers and body dancers were liked well enough. Besides, he had once known a beautiful Alisaarian contortionist. . . .