The night spun off like water. Flame in his face—The world was cast away.
The Zakorian, sucked up into their vortex, held a moment, also flung away.
Only the twisting spine of the road before them now, weirdly splashed with light from the clapping torch, humped, chattering, made nothing now by the weightless entity that sped over it. A road that had become a ribbon across the sky.
A lighted tower, its walkway bunched with watchers, jumped from the blackness, bawled for the Lydian, and vanished.
Fireflies unraveled to tiny threads of gold—the lamps above—the ships below.
Yet the Shansar at his back, his white shadow.
Then a white beating wing.
Then on the road, just wide enough, in a speed like stasis, they were side by side.
The Lydian, in his dream of power, turned and stared and saw the face of the Shansar stare back at him, also locked into the magic of the dream. In that split second they were brothers, and like brothers they might kill each other for a birthright.
The Shansar had gained the inside position, against the rising terraces of the land. His onset had been perfectly gauged, and risked, coinciding with those instants when the unevenness of the road had pushed the Lydian’s chariot to the outer edge—Now only stumbling rock, the open yawn of night and water walled him in. If the Shansar was treacherous to match his cunning and finesse, here would be the place for it.
As if to illustrate this scenario, there came a sickening noise out of the lost shelves of darkness behind them. The screech of iron on bronze, the clangor of collision and a rippling rush of stones which fell; the dreadful girl-like cries of hiddraxi—it seemed, to tell by the answering crescendo along the watch-posts of the suburbs above, that one of the vehicles had gone to its death over the low cliffs into the bay. And, from the tone of the lament, too, that it was the chariot of Alisaarian Kandis which had been lost.
But that was in another country. In this landscape now, only two chariots existed, the game was only for them.
Neither man now looked at the other. Neither attempted, by ways deft or malign, to shift the other off the road. They raced, and still they were team to team, torched prow to prow, shoulder by shoulder. And when the whips rose now to claw the air high above the animal’s necks, they cracked as one. Some god had spoken, Daigoth, Rorn, or the blond man’s scale-tailed lady, to link their cars together. Each striving now, thrusting, coaxing, to bring on the last orgasm of pure speed, the severing that would dash the other from him, and mean victory.
The road began to turn with the cliff, swimming to the right, to the northwest. In three minutes, or less, the blocks and walls of the city would gulp them in again. The home stretch then, north and uphill, on the wide byways, all neatly cleared for it, ablaze with smoke and heat and the lather-spume of the animals, between the booming crowds, through on to the outer circle under the stadium’s bank, around to the south gate once again, in upon the stadium sand where a third of Saardsinmey would be waiting—
Deep in the night, another voice, not of the sea, not from any mortal throat, spoke out.
The animals shrilled in terror. Even as they shrilled, unflagging, they ran.
Each man, the blond Shansar, the dark Vis, turned, irresistibly, and looked away into the pit of black star-swarmed nothing—
And the voice spoke again.
It was not of, and yet it came from, the ocean, yet also from the vault of atmosphere above, and from the rock beneath their chariot wheels.
A century or more ago, the annals of Alisaar recorded, Rorn himself had stalked these waters. It had been a time of unrest and war. In that era, any great happening was possible. Rom, striding the waves, touching heaven with his brow, that had been possible—Aaaurouuu, the voice insisted, a droning, whistling, miaowing howl, parting the night.
Then the earth, like the chariots, began to run.
Before, the road had seemed discarded under the hoofs and wheels, but now it pleated itself together, heaved upward, smote them, trying to throw them off.
Rehger heard the Shansar call out, another language, the tongue of his homeland, but the name of the Ashara goddess was decipherable.
The chariots were no longer airborne. They were earthly things of wood and metal, struggling to keep a purchase. The teams of hiddrax, squealing, bloody foam issuing from their mouths, ran out of rhythm, striking each other with their sides, aliens and teammates alike.
The night was full of roaring, like the ten-thousandfold throat of the stadium.
A faint hot lightning washed through the sky above the sea, and sudden thunder belled after it, and the other sounds ended, snapped out into silence as if some mighty creature had died there.
The ground shivered and lay down flat. The shock was done. Only stones littered down the slopes, a few trickling off into the air, harmlessly passing as they sought the sea. Somewhere above, in the slanting field by someone’s fine house, a dropped lamp had set the trees on fire. This added brightness painted in the deathly face of the Shansar. His dream was over.
Speed-broken, both chariots. Though they still ran, they lumbered.
The Lydian’s whip curled out across the sway of necks, not catching them, correcting only with harsh music.
To this accompaniment, Rehger sang to the hiddraxi love words, a litany of pleasures to come.
Overseen by the throng in the burning orchard above, the team skewed, rollicked. Then melted to order like a blessing. He had slept in their stalls, fed them from his hands, gifted them and caressed them.
“Go, my soul—”
Above, orchard unheeded, the watchers cheered and stamped.
The Shansar, somehow blundering yet at his side, damned him.
The Lydian, feeling the great surge of speed come back, strong and profound as sex, into the reins, the animals, the vehicle, the world, laughed at him. “Tell them in Shansar-over-the-ocean,” he shouted, “Rom was angry!”
And then they pulled away, as if drawn on a rope of riven fire. And slicing northward quite alone, sprang back into the city, to take the last two miles in a downpour of petals and screaming, the stadium gate in an ovation, triumph, gold and glory, within the hour.
It was a sign of Saardsinmey’s sporting fervor that the earthquake, the first to be felt in coastal Alisaar for eighty years, was almost discounted in the closing outburst of the race. The shock had been a slender one, and later, when the tales came in from the watch-towers and the vineyards above the sea, of the Shansar chariot speed-smashing at terror of Ahsaarian Rom’s war horns under the water, even that phenomenon of fear was incorporated in the rejoicing.
The Lydian, winning for Saardsinmey, received the rich prize, the twenty bars of gold. He scarcely needed it, since to the Swordsmen of Daigoth everything in the city came always, in any case, gratis.
Wreathed like a young god in flowers, by firelight in the stadium, the crowd itself became his team and dragged his chariot one whole lap, then bore him on their shoulders. Their love was tangible. And presently, the Saardsin aristocrats, his willing hosts and companions since he began to fight and win before them, trooped to admire him, hang their jewels on him, and their bodies, if he would have them.
The man from Kandis was dead. The had fished him from the bay. The fly silly Ott would never ride the chariots again, nor be much use among the ledgers either, blinded, battered. The Zakorian had been fined for his conduct, and the crowds of the city, getting hold of him, partly stoned him, pinned a notice on his skin that read MURDERER OF KANDS, and sent him toward Free Zakoris tied upside down on a zeeba. The Shansar, coming in second, was hooted, and retired from public view. The Corhlan had the third place, and the rewards youth, bravery and looks might get him at a time of goodwill. The second Shalian was fourth, and had nothing.