In an altered landscape, height was an irrelevance. He did not perceive the other man was the Lydian until he was nearly up to him.
“Where are you going?” the Lydian said. His voice was quiet, lacking the authority with which it had offered twenty men the chance of safety in a tomb.
“The harbor. I thought I saw a beacon.” Chacor hesitated. As if the world were after all sane enough for conversation, he added, “You?” . “I went to try to find someone in a street there.”
“No luck.”
“Well. The house was down. He was always very proud of the house. He got it betting on me.”
As rarely in the stadium, the Lydian was dyed by blood. His hands and arms looked as if they had been toiling in the brickwork, veins enameled darkly on the dark gold of the skin. He said nothing more. He seemed sorry rather than anguished, composed, not stunned.
Chacor turned, and the Lydian accompanied him. They went together toward the harbor.
Well, they lived with death. Of course, any day, the end. One forgot, but they were slaves, too, the Sword-Kings of Ahsaar’s ruby cities. “What will you do?” Chacor said. “Does this make you free?”
“I suppose not,” said the Lydian.
They did not run off to liberty. No need. Saardsinmey, perished, offered this one manumission, or disinheritance.
“Go to Kandis. They said you’ve fought there. And Jow,” said Chacor. “Will you? You couldn’t go up north and hire to Shansars in Sh’alis.”
At the end of the five miles, Gods’ High Gate had come down and blocked the road. By the time they had got over it, and all the mess beyond, and were in reach of the harbor, its ruin and smashed ships, Chacor’s rogue fire had disappeared. Even the volcano seemed vanquished or asleep. Only the sky of ichor and amber burned on and on and on.
Arn Yr, a ship lord from the Lowland port-city of Moiyah, had taken out his vessel, Pretty Girl, a dozen times that summer, with no trouble. This had made him a trifle uneasy, so, a mix, he had offered to Zarok and prayed to Anackire, before again setting sail. Both, it transpired, had been busy with other matters.
No sooner had they begun the crossing through open sea toward northern Alisaar, than the mother of storms hit them.
Pretty Girl was not just a pretty face. Plucky and tough, she took all the weather could give. When the sea calmed, ladled out in an opaque sunrise, they discovered her intact. But they were miles down south, with half the stores gone, and some of the cargo with them. Arn Yr offered his men the vote, whether to turn back to Moiyah, or try for the nearer ports of New Ahsaar, where their predominantly yellow hair might not get them the love they had at home.
The vote went for Alisaar. They said they would dye their manes black like the hero-god Raldnor, if necessary, and laughed. Arn Yr, three quarters Lowland, but with an Ommos grandmother, was not too pleased. But the ships of Moih went by the same democratic values as her cities. They turned for New Alisaar.
The overcast and tingling air they took for some after-aspect of the storm. Then the ship’s instruments began to play up on them, and then the skies grew odd. In a while, no shore in sight, bereft of moon and stars and sun, they were lost, and saw themselves in the hand of the goddess.
Near morning, they made out terrific explosions south and west.
“Someone’s having a fight with someone,” said Arn Yr. He thought he recognized the noise of ballistas and exploding ships. Nowadays Free Zakorian pirates kept to the north and east. This could only be some fracas between Shansar and Alisaar, which boded ill for everyone, let alone poor Pretty Girl. Blond or not, they had begun to trust by now to Saardsinmey’s dockyard and markets.
It was a spectacular dawn, the sky composed of metals and bloomed with stratos. Birds flew over and got some applause, for they meant the coast was near. Some of the birds even settled briefly on the ship, and were fed as fine omens.
Cautious however, and with no sailing wind. Pretty Girl went to rowers stations and nosed westward, having once more a sun to guide her.
They sighted and identified the coast at sunset. They would make Saardsinmey inside four hours.
There was no sign of war.
Only, the sunset lingered, its tints growing hotter . . . After a while, they started to remark on it.
Then the moon came up. It was Zastis, and the flushed Zastian lunar orb was familiar. But this moon was not red. On an endless vermilion east it was a disc of molten orange with a purple halo, and it seemed to shift and flicker like a sun.
The west, too, still held the light torch-red, ringing—The ocean soaked the colors up and looked itself on fire.
In the midst of this, they saw the smoke off to larboard, and concluded somebody’s fleet had burned. The cloud lay nearly firm as sculptured rock along the water, a large mass slowly gliding west.
Every star in the sky was like a blood drop. Zastis itself was not to be seen. They had now had three hours of sunset.
They rowed on for the Alisaarians’ city because it was human, something they understood.
Or so they thought, until they saw it.
The Moiyan ship paused, a mile from land, as they looked on Saardsinmey.
“No Shansarian,” murmured Arn Yr’s deck master, “no men, no weapon on earth, did that.”
“The gods,” said Arn Yr, “did that.”
And reasoning out at last what might have been the gods’ instrument, that tumble of hard black now resting behind them on the sea, still they went in to shore, drawn by horror and compassion, and in case, against all chance, they might render help.
BOOK 3
11
True Slavery
She was in the womb of Yasmat, in the hand of fate.
She was in darkness, which rocked her to and fro.
But she discovered a discrepancy in the substance of the darkness, for half was water, half was not. Then the dark opened. There was a long horizontal shaft of burning red. It had the smell of salt and slime and pitch, yet also a freshness that dizzied her. She gulped at it thirstily, drinking the air, stretching out her hands to it—
Perhaps it was this movement, or some upsurge from beneath, but the great womb which had carried her turned suddenly over. In that instant of birth, as she fell into the sea, Panduv’s instinctive body flung itself away, leaping like a black dolphin in a wave of fire. She did not know why.
Immediately she struck the water she went down. An entirety of liquid closed over her head and pushed her under like a hard hand. Beneath her she glimpsed eternity. But above, the column-tree of the goddess from which she had been sprung, floating in two hollow halves still joined by hinges.
Raising her arms, Panduv dived toward the surface, broke the barrier of the sea into the red light, and pulled herself on to the floating column.
Her body was pulped and battered, as if she had been beaten by masters of torture. Every part of her ached and shrilled, even to her teeth and her loins. She rested face upward on the drum, her arms outspread, one hand dangling in the water. Within this cask of wood and paint and bronze, she had been catapulted through time and space, and fetched up here on an empty sea of blood.
In a blood-red dream, she lay there.
And, in the dream, she later beheld a purple moon come up, and against its flickering, the image of a ship.
When the hook of the grapple thudded home in the column-drum, Panduv did not raise herself. She did not care. •
The ship hauled her in slowly.
Panduv saw, beside her and beneath, in the water, the reflection of the ship, and then, above, the one tall sail. She was a vessel of Sh’alis, mostly Shansarian in design. Over the rail, the faces of men, smudged and staring, and pale of skin, looked down on their catch.
“A black fish of Vis!”
“Or maybe the fires burnt her that color, eh?”