But that night the Lydian went to dine and drink in the house of a nobleman on Sword Street, a mansion with which Rehger was quite familiar. The first wine, the first spiced food for days. And after it, the first woman for a month. It was the custom to visit, before a stadium event, some inn you cared for, and take one token sip of liquor. So that, should you perish, they might say ever after there, He drank the last sweet cup of his life with us.
But the girl who lay in his arms that night, and coiled him with strands of rubies red as Zastis, silken hair and limbs, was a princess of the old royal line, and she said to him, “And if you’d died, I might have boasted, might I not, here he took also a last sweetness. Do you believe me, I stayed celibate as you did, my beloved? I’m glad you’re alive.”
Katemval, however, coming from the stone temple where he had filed the tablet of his promised offering to Daigoth, learned he also had received a gift.
Delivered at his house, in his absence, by unseen porters, a plain cibba-wood casket.
Opened by his slave, Katemval found it contained the strangely-embalmed bodies of two birds. A hawk, a shard of flint lodged in its breast, and from whose talons hung a pigeon.
A sheet of reed paper lay beneath them. Which said:
Victory is transient
Since he is, tonight, your city, tell him this.
5
Alisaarian Night
“Then, what is it?” Rehger said. He lay on a marble slab of the stadium bathhouse, as the slave kneaded his body with wanned oils. Previously, all day since sunrise, he had been in the courts at exercise with sword, spear and knife, or among the slings and bars of the acrobat’s yard. Before that, for two nights and a day, he had been under a nobleman’s roof, in bed with a princess.
“Some means to warn you, or more likely threaten you. Go carefully.”
“Carefully? This to a winner of the Fire Ride,” said Rehger, turning on his back, closing his eyes.
Katemval nodded at the ironic absurdity. His professional gaze—both of slave-taker and of gambling connoisseur—lingered on the young man’s nakedness. There was nothing sexual in Katemval’s optic possessiveness, possibly not even anything sensual. It was the reverence of life’s animal expression, it was the pride of his race, and, even now, of having discovered such a paragon of these things.
Two healed fire-kisses from the chariot-torch temporarily marked Rehger’s jaw and throat. There were few scars on his body, nothing to mar it or infer a weakness. No scars on the mind. Rehger had kept his clarity, his primal innocence. I did that for him. But don’t preen, Katemval thought. The gods did it first.
And he remembered the images Rehger had been used to fashion as a child, even into his seventh year. The training of the stadium had already begun for him—it began in certain ways from the very start. Yet in spare moments, the child, allowed clay, had formed these figures, miniature lizards, orynx, little teams of hiddrax—once he had glimpsed them—with tiny men in the tiny, intricate chariots. They had been, his creations, coming to a fineness, perhaps on the verge of beauty—and at that time, all at once, he stopped. Rehger had ceased making external icons and gone to work on himself.
The masseur was finished. Rehger nodded and the man moved away. In the oval bath beyond the arch, other Swordsmen splashed and swam.
Ought one to say more? Katemval considered. But the box of dead birds, the ominous, elegantly-penned script, seemed irrelevant now. Daigoth had taken his offering. The race was won, there would soon be the demands of other events. And Zastis in the sky before this month was through.
Katemval saw that Rehger had fallen asleep. The high arch of the ribs, the flat belly plated by smooth muscle, rose and sank evenly. Unimpeded, clear, his breathing was silent.
That secure in the arms of Mother Alisaar. Well, then. Let it go.
The fire dancer was black as a Zakor leopard, true Zakoris, but of an elder or younger strain, for her lips were full as flowers, her face was sweet.
She stepped between the long tables of the feast, on to the open mosaic of the floor.
Her arms were ringed by bracelets of white bone. Aside from these, she was covered, neck to ankles, by an opaque and many-colored tide of gauze.
The lamps had been dimmed, the room was hushed.
The dancer extended her hands, with a half-contemptuous flick of the wrists, and waited for the two flaming brands to be given her by a steward. She looked at none of them, the assembly of nobles, their guests and servants. She looked away into some mysterious inner space, to her gods and her art.
The torches, also braceleted in holders of bone, were set in her grasp gently, respectfully. Her fingers closed on them. The steward stepped away. The girl tossed her head. Her hair was fastened up on it in a little tower of gold, and let free again from the top like the tail of a jet-black mare.
Music welled out of the shadows, double pipes, shell harps and drums.
The dancer moved. She became fluid. She flowed and coiled, reshaping herself to the pulse of the music. And the right-hand torch slid down her body—
The gauze, treated with perfumes, lipped by fire, sent out its incense, the aroma seeming to brim the room. The girl lifted the torch away, her throat curved backward and her hair streamed to the floor. She held the torch toward a ceiling-heaven, rather as they did before the Fire Ride, then stroked the brand again downward, to touch her length with flame.
The gauze that covered her sparkled, smoked—a layer of the fabric dissolved in fire, vanished, then another and another smoldered away to nothing. In black moonrise, one bare exquisite night-shade breast was revealed, tipped with a star of diamond.
The dinner party murmured its susurration of approval.
The dancer neither saw nor heard.
The left-hand torch was gliding about her now, at her shoulder, her hip. The undulations of her torso came more quickly, as if to flirt with the fire, or to seduce it. The floating gauzes lit for a second, now here, now there, flared, charred, magically disappeared, each panel of color expending itself into another, and the perfume coming and going. The drum galloped, the pipe ran up and down. Fire fastened its teeth into all her veils, and for a moment she seemed to catch wholly alight, and some of the watchers, startled, cried aloud—but the flame, judged to a hair’s breadth, scattered from her like burning blossoms. She was bare to her pelvis now, but for diamonds. Her anointed skin itself smoldered from the brush of torches. A gem like a dying coal crackled in her navel. The love affair with fire began, as if reluctantly, to languish. . . . The dancer was lethargic, the music altered at her mood, the drums heavy. . . . She leaned to the fire, swooned away from it. She drooped, folded herself, lay on the mosaic and took the ivory fire-spikes from her own hands, gripping them with her feet. Limpid and slow as black molasses, she stood upright on her palms. Her strong legs and narrow feet plied the two fires in the air, then lowered them teasingly along her spine. And suddenly she blazed, became a fireball—there was only fire—out of which there catapulted a somersaulting wheel of wild lights. It spun and came down and turned to stone and was a woman.
The dancer stood scatheless before them, diamond-breasted, diamonds woven at her loins, a garnet in her belly, clothed otherwise only in faint smoke. The torches were held outward stiffly from her sides. She was still as a statue, seeing nothing and no one, as the music ended.
Acclaim rang through the room. She did not note the noise, nor stoop for the jewels that were laid—not thrown—at her feet. Three princes came in turn and gathered them up on her behalf, while her own slave approached to drape the dancer in a cloak of silk.
“Panduv, I never saw you better. You were embracing the Star itself.” The Alisaarian aristocrat bowed to the dancer. Such was the code of Saardsinmey, which revered equally an aristocracy of talent. “Will you come back to my dinner when you’ve dressed? Say you will.”