But as he stood there, shackled and scaled by armor, his thoughts had stayed behind in the temple of his gods beside the river.
Drought had shrunk the river up. On the temple steps dead lilies stank and a spiny water-thing had died. A haze lay on the river, a haze of incense in the temple aisle. The gods towered from the mist, their bodies that were nearly human, their dragon heads, glimmering in the light of propitiating flame.
“Have no fear, great ones,” he said. “I’ll ask you for nothing, as I know quite well you will give me nothing.” Yet they did have something to give.
For, out of the shadow stole his mother, Tibo. She was garbed, and even her hair was dressed, in the manner of the queens of Dorthar and the jewelry fashions of Koramvis. But her skin was painted white, as the face of his enemies.
She said, “The Lowlander will kill you, Amrek.”
Then she called him names and railed against him. She was terrified. They balanced, as did all things that morning, on the edge of the world. The fall was not to be avoided. But when he turned from her, she stayed him. She was not Tibo, surely, but Val Mala, that woman whose soul was so young it was purblind, half mad. Her existence had been that of a sensual, spiteful and selfish child. Now she was a savage child, frightened even from its child’s cunning, abetted by a poisoned knife. “Hear the truth from me,” she said.
And she told him then how he had been got on her by her lover, conniving in her bed. He was not the son of the king, no Storm Lord, not Rehdon’s sowing—as was Raldnor, who would kill him. He had no identity. An imposter, the gods of Dorthar denied and would cast him down.
When she stopped, he had nothing to say to her.
He did not interrogate her, or reject her words. Nothing in his life, and nothing in that crucial instant, gave him the impetus to do so.
And very soon, borne forward by the chariot of fate, war and death, he rode from the city, off the world’s edge, into a country without wars or cities, or rivers, without titles, gods, or names.
The pre-dawn stirring about the cattle-market wakened him, as normally it always did, two hours before the sky lost its Visian darkness. His routines were recurrent but flexible. Breakfast was to be had among the stalls and charcoal braziers by the market gate, with drovers and watchmen. If it was a day for early exercise, he would cross the three streets to the Academy of Arms. For his monthly fee, morning or evening, he could engage Moiyah’s best sword-masters, Dortharian-trained, (who in turn vied to duel with a professional, sometimes set him to school others and saw him paid for it.) The standard of the gymnasium courts was not far below those of a stadium. Otherwise one had access to the Academy baths, their staff of barbers, and masseurs, and, if one wished it, the periphery talent of fortune-tellers, betting cliques, commercial telepaths and joy-girls.
Moih being Moih, it was nothing at the Academy to see a rich man’s soft sons working out, or gambling, with the garrison soldiers or sturdy porters from the docks. Rehger’s personal myth had become known among them and he was greeted there as “Lydian, even by the elite of the Racers’ Guild, who spoke of their horses as if they were mistresses, and of not much else.
Usually, by the time the sky had melted to Lowlander pallor, the Lydian was on Marble Street.
But between Marble Street and the Academy, in a small wine-shop known as the Dusty Flower, Rehger and Yennef had spent Chacor’s wedding night. Until the third. Vis-black hour of morning, they sat either side the table. To the house’s sorrow, they drank no vast amount, neither did they talk to any lavish extent. A stilted frankness stumbled between them. There was a kind of distaste, a reluctance to remain and, curiously, eventually, a hesitation at parting.
They had no physical contact. They broke from each other, the two men, like thieves who have planned a crime, or perhaps met to review one long committed.
Rehger did not think he would see the Lan (his father) again.
After all this, there was less than an hour for sleep, but Rehger took it, and dreamed the dream, which the words of Yennef had probably imposed on him.
“The line of descent is easy enough. I have it by heart, for what it’s worth. The woman was a prophetess, a priestess. Safca. Amrek’s daughter, by some courtesan, who escaped into Lan when the Lowland War reached Dorthar. This Safca might not have been reckoned, except that she had the snake mark on her wrist.”
She became holy, Safca, in the upheavals of her time. In the peace which followed, she married into the royal house of Lan, a subsidiary branch. She bore one son late in life, Yalen, a prince, marked as she was, in the same way. Yalen who had his left sleeves cut short to show the brand of Anack. . . . When he was in his forty-sixth year, he fathered a bastard on a serving-girl in a village hostelry. It was on a hunting trip. He used to sport and say, “That spring I acquired the seven wolfskins and Yennef, in the backhills.”
The Lan did not relate this with any bite. There had been anger, once, but it altered to irony. The hill girl had walked every step of the road to the capital, and sought out Prince Yalen on Audience Day, with the yowling baby wrapped in her apron. “He was decent to her. He set her up with a tavern in the city, and took me into his household. He had his lawful heirs. Besides, in Lan, the closer the blood-tie the more the offspring are worth. The old man had married his half-sister for that. The slough of the pot-wench wasn’t worth anything. But he was fair to me. I was allotted the title it’s customary to award, in such a case. They call you the god-gift. That was Yennef, the god-gift. The trophy Yalen never wanted that the gods forced him to have.”
He grew up chafing, could not recall when it started. At thirteen he stowed away on a Xarabian ship. That was the beginning of his travels.
“The year he got the wolfskins and Yennef. I never even had the goddess mark. But the bloodline’s simple. Have you memorized it? Amrek to Safca, Safca to Yalen, Yalen to Yennef. Yennef—to Rehger Am Ly Dis.” And Yennef had added, “Get a son. Pass the commodity on. Life, I mean. The trade of living.”
In the subfusc of the Flower, his face blurred and often averted, Yennef seemed, by his coordinated movements, his light voice, the ironic remnant of his youthful anger, a very young man still.
“There is a tale, mind you, Amrek was never sired by Rehdon the Storm Lord. Mala the bitch-queen had him off the king’s counselor, in order to hold on to her status—Rehdon couldn’t plough her, they said. She scared him so his seed went to water. It might be, or it might not. She was a wicked slut, brainless. She might have miscalculated, or spread lies. She hated her only son.”
Surely she had, had hated Amrek. Rehger had felt her hate strike like venomed steel on his bones.
And Amrek had believed her. Or he was beyond caring. In the arena it might happen sometimes, there would be a man like that. Come for an appointment with death.
But Amrek was gone, into the past. Rehger—hearing the sounds of the market, an exuberant, self-important present below his window—felt the huge empty rush of time that spilled all things away. Aztira had promised that in Moih he would meet his father. This had taken place, but there was no meaning to it. Rehger had been a peasant’s get in Iscah, he had been a Swordsman in Alisaar. Those lives were gone, as was the life of Amrek.
He did not go that morning to the exercise courts of the Academy. He walked slowly toward Marble Street, and reaching it, beheld the sun rising over the eastern slopes of the city. The stone-shops along the lower concourse were already active. He could see the smoke, and hear the beat of drums where they were “serenading” the scored marble to make it split by vibration. Less than two years, yet Moiyah was well-known to him, as if he had dwelled here longer. Small, she could have fit inside Saardsinmey like an egg in a dish. Yellow amber, for the rubies of the west.