He missed that and grated, “But to you and yours, Corrah doesn’t exist.”
“All things exist. Look at that pebble lying there. You might call it um and I might call it oom. Isn’t it still a pebble, and lying there?”
An abrupt wave of relaxation swept over Chacor, stunning him. The girls of Moih were well-schooled in the means of debate. And how lovely this one was, summer-brown as a girl of Iscah, her color coming and going and her eyes on fire and her hair not like hair at all but a sheet of hot white light.
“Respite,” said Chacor, a term he had picked up from the dueling etiquette of Alisaar. “Put down your sword, lady. You’ve won. My apologies. Your father sacrifices to Zarok, too, doesn’t he?”
Then she laughed. And then he remembered why she had made the offering.
Presently they were in a public garden under the yellow boughs, the princess climbing a tree, and the maid gone away to buy the juice of berries.
They were speaking of ordinary things, not even religion, and he had not questioned her again about the offering. Elissi had become a real person. Suddenly it came to him that she loved him. Though not in the normal headlong and demanding way to which his travels among young women had accustomed him.
He found it difficult thereafter not to flaunt himself, to make himself grand and beautiful in her eyes. But he must be cautious. There was jeopardy in this. She was not a flower of the wayside, but the protected daughter of a man who had himself lavished upon Chacor great kindnesses.
So, he restrained himself somewhat. But even so, he did tell her his beginnings, that he was a prince, and Corhl was far behind him. He did sit there with her under the trees and speak of the end of Saardsinmey. He let her see, not meaning to, not evading, the impress that had since then been upon him, as if the death cry of a million despairing hearts had darkened his own.
The afternoon tilted away toward sunset. A bloom dropped from the trees upon his hand. (Summer was going, too, toward its set.) He put the bloom in her hair. He had now been silent a long while, she with him. Looking at them, the passersby would think, perhaps, Chacor had some Lowland blood, and that they spoke within.
“The sintal grew in the old city of the south,” she said. “There was an elder language, then. Sintal, It means goddess-hair, ”
“Like yours,” he said, and wondered if he should bite out his tongue.
But Elissi only told him, “We say, we, too, are Anackire, for Anackire is all things, and all things one thing. Each of us has God within him, is God, Chacor.”
“You credit that souls come back to be bom again; death doesn’t count.”
“Even if,” she said, “that weren’t so, the terror and anguish of Saardsinmey is over. The pain is done, for them. And if the pain goes on for you, then let it be a part of you, Chacor. But not, Chacor Am Corhl, you a part of /r.”
They walked back in the youthful evening, one pair among scores of couples, drinking chilled fruit juice, praising the monkey as she walked daintily by their side on her long leash. The maid had found her own young man, a carter from Marble Street, and been allowed to run away until the dinner hour.
He permitted himself no familiarity. He did not even take her hand.
At dinner, he spoke to Jerish, accepting the company of the soldiers going toward Xarabiss, and asking after a zeeba he could now afford to hire. On Arn Yr he next attempted to leave ten silver parings, and was refused.
Later, looking for Elissi in the garden, Chacor did not find her. He was sorry and relieved.
Somewhere on the two-and-a-half-day ride up to the fort, Jerish and his sergeant sold Chacor the soldier’s life. Partly it was done, he thought in confusion soon after, by inquiring what he meant to aim for in Xarabiss, or Dorthar? Then he as well would have to inquire into his prospects. He had always been a drifter, taking up brawling as a trade, but, in Alisaar, he had learnt something of chariots, of hiddraxi and zeebas, and of the methods of the sword. Now soldiering seemed to present itself as this same trade and learning, in better harness. He had begun to get on with Jerish and his officers, and the mixed “pack,” which called itself the Plains Wolves, were a lively bunch, three-quarters yellow Moiyan and a quarter everything else under the sun. Black-bronze skin did not debar from command, either, Jerish was proof. While the Dortharian captain who was to govern the Dortharian peacetime battalion in the fort, was a white blond.
Besides, after this paid brawl got stale, Chacor could opt out of it. As Jerish assured him, provided he gave due warning of intended departure, and providing New Alisaar or Ommos were not actually training ballistas on the city, there would be no checks.
Once he was in, and the cut and dried rigmarole of military training started, Chacor wished himself off and away. But it was too late then. Moih’s new recruits received two months’ pay in advance. Thereafter, they kept an eye on you.
Then, he began not to mind it so much.
He began to discover brothers, against whom he could try his strength and his fighting wiles as much as he wanted, and still go drinking with them in the village under the walls at night.
The city he returned to for his leaves, or more usually went up across the border into windy Xarabian Sar, from which Raldnor the hero had claimed false derivation. Rehger Chacor had lost touch with. Jerish said the Lydian was still employed by Vanek. Arn Yr, intent once more on profitable voyaging, beyond one visit Chacor avoided. (He did not see her, either.)
Just before the winter closed down, in the interim of thaw, there was a tirr hunt. The filthy beasts had been massing in the area, their castings and stench marking the tracks and trails, and there were stories of gypsies and village children poisoned by their claws. Tirr were hated worse than any wolves. Chacor, who had hunted them in Corhl, had some tips to offer which proved effective. They wiped out three nests, and brought home one whole flat-skulled jutting earless head and flange of talons, carefully unvenomed, to set by stealth on the officers’ supper dish.
Winter was bleak, and they damned it extravagantly, always ritualistically complaining about the weather, the difficulty of getting to Moiyah and Xarabiss. The fires blazed high in the mess. On sentry-go you might watch the stars Elyrian fashion, in the winter clarity of sky above the turrets by night. Beneath, the bay had frozen and the sea was plates of ice. The white fields stretched off from the fort the other side. Chacor favored a mix-Sarish girl, but she was like all the other free girls he had gone with. By the time of the thaw rains, they had even-temperedly done with each other.
It was Jerish and Annah’s wedding that spring. The Plains Wolves were heading back to the city garrison. Chacor had for three months been moving upward, and was now offered the rank of division sergeant under a Moiyan captain. It meant another stint at the fort. But with hunting weather returning and the leave-route open again to Xarabiss, he was not unwilling to stay. Best of all, there were tales not merely of tirr but of bandits in force on the border. It was in Chacor yet, the viral restlessness that sought release in combat.
He did go to the wedding. He was chosen by Jerish in fact to be one of the Raiding Party—a custom of the wedding—along with Vathcrian cousins and boyhood friends from the army. He could not have said no.
In the uproar and festivity he did not properly see Elissi until the dancing began. Moih had a form of dance not yet popular in Vis lands. Here the sexes mingled, hand-locked, man with girl, in long lines. Elissi came by with a soldier of the Wild Cats. She looked still and smiling, but her face was not vivacious, as Chacor remembered. Mostly he saw how the winter had paled her skin. What had been Iscaian honey was now Amanackire snow.
They spoke some words to each other during the evening, wishing the bridal couple well.