In the garden courtyard of the house on Gem-Jewel Street, Katemval was breakfasting, while his tame water-birds pecked at crumbs or swam about in the cistern.
When the slave came out, followed by the sun-blazoned figure of Rehger, a note of keen gratification went through the older man. It was rarely now that the hero sought his inventor ... if the attentions had ever been frequent, or more than the easy friendly courtesy the
Lydian extended to most of humanity, his fellow Swords, the city nobles, the drudges of taverns, the gambling mob. (Yet I’m soothing to him. He knows that. Here he is now, some enquiry on his lips. He used to ask me many things, long ago, when I told him the stories of my travels, other lands, legends. Alisaar’s his earth, he can never go anywhere else, or want to. But my mind-box is his library. We’re to fight Thaddrians, have you seen Thaddra? I was offered a team of animals from Dorthar, would they be worth going for?)
“Sit, eat, drink. And ask me,” said Katemval.
Rehger smiled. “Is it so obvious?”
Seating himself, then, a dash of sea-sand fell from his mantle. He was dressed for evening fare, but he had been on the beach.
“Not the princess, surely,” said Katemval.
Rehger glanced at the sand, which some of the water-birds had come to try. He took one of the little breakfast cakes and broke it for them, stroking their necks of irridescent indigo as they ate, “No, not a princess. There was something curious with the sea. At dawn, when she and I were walking back toward the harbor wall, the tide had gone farther out than I ever saw. A couple of ships outside the basin were in difficulties, they were pulling cargoes off in a hurry. She was afraid of the sea, she said it meant something bad would happen. You know what those girls are like sometimes.”
“I remember.”
“But the fishermen were down the beach, waving their arms and running about. There were scores of fish left behind all over the mud. The men said to me Rorn was thirsty, he was drinking the sea.”
“The waters beyond Alisaar were always strange. Myth used to have it they rolled on into the ocean of Hell, Aarl, All-Death. Then the traders began going back and forth to the white men’s lands, and Hell had to move its traps. But you can see sailors, the ones who stick to the south routes and the west, hair gone gray, and some of the fishermen and shore-liners get it, as far up the coast as Hanassor. Bleached by Aarl-salt—and it turns the brain, too, probably. It’ll have been the tremor on the night of the Fire Ride. The land shudders, then the sea does flighty things. But that isn’t what you came to ask.”
“No, Katemval.”
The slave hurried out again with a fresh griddle of hot cakes, and honey-curd and raisins—and to remove the milk, regardless of Katemval, which the Children of Daigoth never drank. Rehger thanked the slave, waiting till he was gone to say, “Who was Amrek? I mean the Storm Lord. Do I have the name right?”
“You do. Amrek son of Rehdon, the last Vis High King. He was the one who said he’d wipe all smudge of the Lowlanders off life’s face. But Rehdon’s bastard, Raldnor—half Vis, half Lowlander, and Anackire Incarnate for a mother, if you swallow all the tale—Raldnor made a treaty with the other continent, the blond men of Vathcri, Vardath and Shansar, and picked up the Lowlanders and told them they were magicians. And armed with that, he whipped Amrek into an early grave. Koramvis city was smashed to bits in the earthquake. Anackire sat on the mountains and applauded like a lady at the stadium. Around a hundred years back, it happened again, another way round. Free Zakoris wanted war, but the war was stopped. The gods stopped it. If you believe all that.”
“Do you?”
“Well, if I spill the salt I ask the god’s pardon like some up-country wench. And I sacrifice regularly in the temples. I even make an offering now and again in the Shalian temple near Tomb Street. To the snake woman. Just to be on the safe side. But the gods walking the water—I can never quite credit that. I don’t even know if I credit the gods. May they excuse me.”
Rehger laughed softly. But his eyes were distant. His unleveled beauty, as he sat there at the ordinary sunny table, filled Katemval with an instantaneous anxiety. It seemed to provoke fate. The years of fighting and winning, the crown of the great race—and no mark on him, no disfigurement to appease the envy of perhaps nonexistent gods.
“But Amrek,” said Katemval, “why Amrek?”
Rehger looked down at the ornamental birds. Katemval looked at them, too, remembering that casket with the hawk and pigeon in it. Sometimes slum archers bagged such suppers—the shard of flint in the raptor’s breast seemed to indicate this was their origin. But then some other one had bought or taken the trophy. They were not embalmed, as it turned out. The corpses were kept pristine by some other perturbing method. Flung on the compost behind the house, even now, the slave said, they had not decayed. Nor had anything utilized the carrion.
“Yesterday, it was suggested to me,” Rehger said, “that I come direct from Amrek’s line.”
“You’re Iscaian. There was no look of it, there,” Katemval said promptly. He was unnerved. He thought. And every look of it in you. By a pantheon of gods—yes—
“Well, Katemval. My father was just a man who had my mother, not an Iscaian. He left her that golden drak, remember. She told me something of how he looked, tall and strong, and dark. He might have been rich, once. And he said he was a Lan. Is that possible? Is there some remnant of Amrek’s house in Lan?”
“Now wait—wait—” Katemval tapped the table, so the raisins jumped in their dish. “Lanelyr—About the time of that non-war. A priestess who claimed descent from Amrek Am Dorthar. She married into the royal house at Amlan. Not to the Lannic throne, you understand, which only goes to brothers and sisters or sons with mothers, incestuous pairings.” Abruptly Katemval ceased. He sat and looked at Rehger, realizing that the boy—the man—had never bothered to mention this vital circumstance of his begetting, all through their years of friendship)—which plainly was not any kind of friendship at all. Katemval said, in a foolish, stricken voice, before he could control himself, “Didn’t you trust me, to tell me that? Your mother’s honor, was it?”
Rehger glanced up. His eyes lost for a second the sheen of distance, they gentled, as Katemval had seen them do with a woman or a beast. Insulted, Katemval drew away as Rehger reached out to clasp his arm. And the gentleness went. Rehger shook his head impatiently.
“I thought it was unimportant, who he was. I never told you because it meant nothing to me.”
“What can it mean now?” Katemval said. “You’re a Saardsin Sword.”
“A slave, yes,” Rehger said, offhandedly. “But I should like to know. If I have a king’s blood. If my mother took me from a king’s descendant.”
“All right,” said Katemval. He was brusque. “Stroll along Three Penny Alley and find a soothsayer, or some witch, and ask her to cast it out for you.”
“It was a sorceress who told me first,” Rehger said.
Katemval thought of a white image by a wall, a message of downfall, of weird rumors concerning a raising of the dead—
“Don’t go to her,” Katemval said. “If it’s the Amanackire woman. No.”
“It seems I may have to.”
“No, I said. Certainly, she is a witch. Without pleasantries, the deadly sort. Like all her race, the white ones. There’s a tale they have some colony, in the northwest jungles—oh, beyond Zakoris. They plot there and ferment their cold sickly magics. The written warning I told you of, it has that tone. It must have come from her—”