“Perhaps you will,” he said, “accept both as an explanation and an apology, the fact that you are, sir, my father.”
Yennef became fly. He narrowed his eyes and took in more thoroughly what he was seeing. Then he drank from the wine-cup.
“Well, here and there, I’ve had that accusation made. Usually it’s by the woman involved.”
“My mother is in Iscah. Or, she may be dead. It isn’t an accusation. As I said, a fact.”
The Lan glanced him up and down, cool, and guarded.
“But perhaps I was never in Iscah.”
“Yes. It was winter. She said robbers had set on you.”
“No, no, my gallant,” said Yennef, “that was last summer, here. Bandits by the Dragon Gate.”
“You seem to have then, sir, a penchant for being robbed. She discovered you near the farm, disabled with a knife-cut in one arm. She persuaded the men to give you shelter, in the dog-house.” (Yennef ejected a virulent oath.) “Once you were fit, you went on your way, but before that you had my mother. Her name was Thioo.”
“I had her? You mean I forced her?”
“She went to you. She gave herself and you took.”
“Did I? It seems a man can get desperate, in the Iscah mountains. If I was there.”
“You left her a token.”
“Well, one finds one must. Doubtless you’ve found that, too.”
“An Alisaarian drak of bronze-mixed gold.”
“Oh. She must have been a spicy lay, then. I was poor in those days.”
“You remember those days.”
“No,” said Yennef, “but from your looks, it has to have been some twenty-five years ago.”
“A little more.”
“Ah, a little more.” Yennef had another drink. “You’re from Alisaar yourself.”
“The men on the farm sold me for a slave. I was shipped to Alisaar.”
“You don’t look like a slave.”
“I was a Saardsin Sword.”
A glint of fascination went under and over Yennef’s deliberate facade.
“That I do credit. I’ve seen them fight, and race. Saardsinmey had the best—and lost the best. Anack had you in her hand, if you survived the city.”
“They think here Anackire has all things in her hands.”
“She has enough hands,” said Yennef flippantly.
His mind, in spite of him, was burrowing. Each time he drank the yellow wine, he seemed to sink back another year, to some other place. Of course, he had been in Iscah, in Corhl and Var-Zakoris, too. There had been a mad expedition, anger and youth and some simpleton’s story, hopes of treasure—he could hardly recollect, only the fruitless venture and the traveling. There were plenty of escapades, and just as many girls. Dark women, smoky women, smooth skin and a smooring of night hair.
“So you had your friends abduct me on the street because you claim I’m your father.”
The younger man said, “No, I’m as startled as you, to find you here. But they recognized you, no doubt.”
“I see. It’s that we have a resemblance to each other. It does make some sense.”
“Don’t you,” said the younger man quietly—he had stayed even and polite throughout, under Yennef’s attempts to heat him up—“have a knife scar on your left arm?”
“Two or three as it happens. Shall I strip my sleeve? You can choose which one’s Iscaian.”
Yennef finished the wine.
The other man said, “You see, we’d have no business with each other, except that there are questions I should like to ask you.”
“I’m not rich,” said Yennef. “And anyway, I have a legal wife, in Dorthar, and three legal sons.”
“The questions have nothing to do with your estate, sir.”
“Yennef. Call me Yennef. I’m not some antique gray beard. I used to be your age, not a hundred years ago. My sons have less respect, I can assure you. And my wife’s a ravening shrew.” The wine was going to his head.
“Then I won’t ask you,” said the other, calm, inexorable, “to strip your sleeve. I’ll strip mine.” And putting his hand to a plaited leather wristlet—a badge of the Artisan’s Guild in Moih, now Yennef considered it—he loosed and pulled it off. He came forward then, and showed to Yennef in the lamplight the lean articulate hand and muscled forearm of a professional fighter, itself with one streamlined scar which ended at the wrist. Here, where the wristlet had been and the scar ended, the skin was clasped in a circlet of dull silver scales.
“Aside from the scars of knives,” he said, “will you tell me, Yennef, do you have a mark on you like this?”
Yennef felt giddy. It was the final years peeling away. He had suddenly recalled the barren mountain valleys, the blue-white snow piled up like death, and warm beauty slender as a bone that found him there, wedged with the dog among the rocks.
“I don’t,” he said. “Not I. But my father had a callus like that. As you have it, on the left wrist. It was broader in him, it ran as far as the lower joint of the thumb. He never hid it. He was proud of it. He used to have his sleeve cut slightly short, on the left arm. You know what it is?”
“The snake mark, the sigil of the line of Amrek, the Storm Lord.”
Yennef shook himself, trying to shift from one dimension to another, out of the past.
“Who told you? Your mother?”
“Not my mother. A sorceress of the Lowlanders.”
“Ah.” Yennef stared at his son, and saw himself at long last, in the golden mirror. None of his Dortharian getting—known scarcely better than this one—had returned such a likeness. They took after their dam, and had her stupidity to add burnish. “It’s come to me,” said Yennef. “I mean, going with your mother. Tibo—that was it, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Tibo. Thioo, in Iscah.”
“You say—you don’t know if she’s dead?”
Still quiet, reasonable: “It was an ungenerous life. She wasn’t well-treated. Women in those parts seldom were.”
“I didn’t think of it—getting her with child. And then those cretinous blockheads sold you. How old were you? For the stadium, it can’t have been much more than five or six.”
Abruptly Yennef turned away. He walked off and sat down in a hard stiff chair, and put his head in his hands.
He said after a moment, “You embarrass me. I don’t know you, or what to say.”
“My name is Rehger. They used to call me the Lydian, in Alisaar.”
“That’s kudos, isn’t it—fame by name of the birthplace—Anack’s breasts, I’ve heard of you. I laid a bet on you—three years—four years back—I was at Jow. I only saw you at a distance, an inexpensive seat. But you won. Blade and spear. A hundred silver draks. I should have risked more—”
“At least,” Rehger said, “that repaid your outlay on Tibo.”
Yennef looked up. He rose to his feet, straightening himself.
“I don’t expect or want your filial regard. Swordsman.”
“We’re strangers to each other,” Rehger said. “But I’d value my history, if you can give it me.”
“You want to boast your descent from Amrek Accursed-of-Anackire on the streets of Anackire’s Moih?”
Rehger smiled, as Yennef had seen princes do, when they wished to put you at ease. The eyes were like her eyes, if Yennef could only remember what she had looked like. For he could not, of course.
Only that she had been beautiful, and a lucky find. Though there was one single image, almost supernatural, flickering between the shadow and the red whisper of a fire—when she had come to him—and he had thought, or only said he thought—the goddess, Cah—
“There’s no more wine in this jug,” said Yennef. “And that damned Zakorian or whatever he is, the prankish bridegroom, has locked the door again.”
But trying the door, they learned another had come at some time to turn the key. They were at liberty.
16
The Charioteer
Rehger rode out of the city in the black chariot of war, among the soldiery and the banners, under the burnt-blue lid of the sky. And the crowds of the city cried and shouted, and the women threw withered garlands and silks like blood. And the rumble of the marching feet, the wheels, the drums and rattles, were the voice of the storm, going down to battle and to death.