But the white stone glimmered on the dark, tantalizing him. Having seated himself to ponder it, he had slept.
Vanek put himself out of the chair (seducer, not even comfortable), and lit the glass-topped lamp in the alcove. Bearing it back with him, he let the light and shade play upon her, the white girl in the ice. But the murmur of inner things was gone. He had slept, and not kept hold of it. How simply the body could divert the intellect.
And now, only a speck of fire fluttered like a bee on a marble face.
Vanek drew up the veil again, as Rehger had done, to protect his work from how much dust now, and how long a neglect?
The light in the lamp dipped, steadied.
Vanek thought of a nursery rhyme of Moih:
Blow out the lamp, Where is the flame? Light the lamp, There is the flame. Flame, flame, How is it so—Where do you come from? Where do you go?
Elissi would teach that to her children, no doubt. He had seen her, nine dusks before her wedding, going with a willing Chacor into the Anackire temple, to offer.
Flame, flame, how is it so?
Each life budding forth, withering away. But always, always, struck into another spark, to burn up again inside a lamp.
Flame, flame—
Knowing his stair, and all the house, miserly, not needing any light, Vanek blew out the lamp.
BOOK 5
Var-Zakoris to Thaddra
18
Bargains
On a darkening backdrop, Zaddath was closing the brass-bound doors of her Blue Gate, to the sound of horns. The procedure was carried on at every sunset. Sunrise saw the gate opened with the same ceremony. It was a Vardian way of doing things, for Zaddath, the New Capital of Old Zakoris, was a Vardish city. Now a Guardian sufficed to rule here; the kings had gone home across the seas. The gate, however, stayed a monument to the conqueror, its uprights garnished by mighty fifty-foot Ashkars (the Vardish Anackire), and the surface of the wall torchlit for two miles either side, and faced with tiles of violet glaze.
Missing getting in the gate was not too serious an affair. The suburbs had long since overrun the city, taking in as they went the villas, temples and taverns strewn along the Zaddath South Road. The swamps, too, had been drained, but still the proliferating forest encroached continually on this island of building. Even in the paved streets, whippy tentacles of verdure endlessly emerged, to be hacked and hauled, their roots gouged out with fire. Any house left untended on the outskirts was filled by the jungle and ruined in ten days or less. In the gravid nights of the hot months, in the depths of walled stone Zaddath, frogs chirped and crickets made their sing-song, and large insects dashed themselves against gauze bed-curtains and died there like smoldering jewels.
The riders, who had just missed the gate, showed no inclination to retreat to a handy inn.
Progressing into the gate mouth, the foremost man seized the chain of a bronze bell hanging there and clanged it.
Two soldiers appeared on the walk above.
“You, what d’you think you’re at?”
“Inviting you to let me in.”
“Flit over the wall. Or wait till morning. Lay your hand on that bell again, and it’ll be a flogging.”
“Yours,” called Galutiyh Am Dorthar. “I’ve got business with the Warden and Council.”
“What authority?”
“Come and see.”
After a wait, three bad-natured soldiers and an officer who had been at dinner, clattered down the stair. Galutiyh displayed some seals. They were impressive. The goddess of Dorthar’s High Council, the authentic golden Snake and Rod of Shansarian Alisaar, the Lion-Astride-the-Dragon symbol of Zaddath herself.
The tone of the sentries changed. They cracked a postern, and presently Galutiyh and his riders trotted into the city.
Galutiyh swaggered through the Council Hall at Zaddath, having left his escort of ruffians on the street. The place was mostly empty but for secretaries scribbling in cubbies. For such a career Galutiyh’s family had intended him, but he had been more venturesome. He worked and wormed and vaulted his way up. Gray-eyed Galutiyh was not all Lowland-Dortharian. He had a lot of Thaddrian blood on his mother’s side. For the Lowland—or other continent—connection, it was somewhere, but no one knew where. He claimed a Lowland grandfather, and had now said it so often he partly believed it himself.
When Counselor Sorbel entered the allotted chamber, Galutiyh was quite gratified. Sorbel, called after the Vardish king, was also the right hand of Zaddath’s Warden. Nevertheless, he seemed brisk.
“What do you want, Galut?” (Galutiyh winced at this Thaddrian abbreviation of his name.) “Really a drama, at the gate. No one here would like you to abuse your privileges.”
“My lord, I earned my privileges by devotion. It seemed to me speed wasn’t inappropriate.”
“And why?”
Galutiyh recounted his reason.
Sorbel altered. He looked keener, less at ease.
“This story of an Amanackire woman,” Sorbel eventually said, “is a—” he used the Vardian expression, and in Vardian: “Flimsy mast on which to fix a sail.”
Galutiyh allowed himself to demonstrate he understood the phrase. “Even so, when the Council of Dorthar sent me to investigate the Plains, I was instructed in this—story. And then it occurred to me the Council here was more in need of my findings . . . they seemed to think it was important. Wasn’t it?”
“Don’t be insolent.”
“Excuse me. Lord Sorbel. Blame the rigors of the journey. Fifty-three days by land and sea.”
“Where is the man?”
“Safely shut in a hostelry five miles back down the Zaddath South Road.”
“All right. Wait here.”
Sorbel went out and Galutiyh sat down. A minute later, a servant brought a tray of cakes and Vardish wine, which boded well.
A great beetle, glistening like a drop of ichor, clung by its pincers to the window-post. One of the three men in the room lurched toward it, raising the pommel of his knife to crush the insect.
“Why not let it live,” said the third man quietly. It was the first thing he had said for a long while, and the significance of this, apparently, stayed the man with the knife.
“What do you care?”
“Can’t stop him, can you?” said the second man.
The third man was shackled to the table by a iron cuff on his right wrist.
The blond mix, who had been disturbed by an increasing abundance of insect life on their journey west and north, lifted the pommel higher. Beyond the window, the black night tinked and purred.
“In Alisaar,” Rehger said, as quietly as before—and as before the other hesitated—“it was thought unlucky to kill anything before a duel or combat. Since the gods strike in the same way, suddenly, perhaps without cause or care. Like the beetle, you might not see the blow coming.”
Galutiyh’s blond ruffian stared at the beetle. Grudgingly he lowered his knife.
“Anackire protects,” he said, ritually. He worshiped all gods, and none.
He went back to the far end of the table where Rehger’s second guard, a swarthy Ommos-mix, giggled. “Scared of the gladiator? Wait till he breaks the chain. No? Isn’t he mighty enough?”
Galutiyh first produced a shackle when they came off the Xarab ship at the border port. He had requested Rehger to allow this necessity. Rehger did not argue. Once he was cuffed, the other end of the chain was fastened to the wrist of one of Galutiyh’s biggest fellows, a dumb, brown-haired man, with crazy eyes. “After all,” said Galutiyh to Rehger, when it was done, “you won’t mind that. You’re a slave, aren’t you?” They had ridden the roads up into Xarabiss and there had been some dithering about before they took ship. Galutiyh obviously suspected he was being followed, but had then eluded his pursuer, leaving evidence of a trail continuing on to Dorthar, or at least a more northerly town. Instead, they crossed the Inner Sea at its narrowest point and put in at the edge of Shansarian Alisaar. In a cove on the border a half-rotten fishing skimmer or two lay rubbing her sores on the rocks. One of these hags consented to bear the party up the coast. It was windless weather, and the crew rowed, and Galutiyh’s men lounged among the reeking kreels, sometimes casting line themselves for fish or water-snakes off the bows. The Zakor sailors paid them scant attention.