Zakoris ranged herself on the left hand, to all intents impassable country, jungle-forest rising back in stairs that choked the sun, or wading out even into the sea. During the day, Rehger was again unshackled; after dark the chain was fastened to an iron ring in the mast. When this second voyage of twenty airless, mindless days and anchored nights ended at the Var-Zakor port of Ilva, Galutiyh commandeered some scrubby horses. Then the chain was lengthened and the dumb man and Rehger rode side by side. At night, when the travelers halted, Galutiyh would undo the dumb man and chain himself to Rehger. “May I lie with you, dearest?” asked Galutiyh. But even then, as always until then, Galutiyh did not trespass beyond a few words. He would only chide Rehger in the morning, “How beautifully you sleep! Not a snore or a nightmare. Teach these others, will you? Their moans and snuffles drive me insomniac.”
Getting on the Zaddath Road, riding through the villages and into the suburbs, they were looked at, and Rehger—or it might be the dumb man who shared the daytime chain—was marked as a culprit. Once some black-skinned priests emerged from a wayside temple. They purified the road, when the company had gone by, both of horse-dung and criminal aura. Generally the native Zakorians were less interested than the conqueror Vardians. There was little sign of mixture, but neither any of oppression. Close to the conqueror capital, the Zakorians adhered with seeming equanimity to Vardish ways, mostly dressed and carried on as Vardians, and were bilingual. Here and there you might see the emblem of a black Ashkar-Anackire, but never a white-skinned Zarduk or Rorn.
There were laws in Zaddath, too, concerning human noise after midnight. The hostelry was therefore very still, and the sound of hoofs approached distinctly along the road.
“There’re our mates, coming back,” said the blond mix. Relieved, he threw his knife quivering into the wooden wall.
Torchlight began to hit the lintel of the window where the beetle clung.
When the door was opened, neither Galutiyh, nor any of the mates, presented themselves. It was a natty Vardian officer and five Zakorian guard.
The Vardian demanded that Rehger be delivered to him.
Galutiyh’s men obeyed.
In the courtyard, “I see you’re a gentleman. If you’ll swear by the goddess not to lark around, you can ride free into the city.”
“I don’t worship the goddess,” said Rehger, with the frankness of a good child, the Vardian thought, rather taken with him.
“Well, that’s straightforward. By any god you respect, then, or just your word, I think, would do.”
“Of course,” said Rehger. “You have it.”
The chamber was lamplit and windowless. A vane stood wide in the ceiling behind a sieve of linen. Moths still drizzled down. Aside from Galutiyh, and Rehger, there was no man in the room who was not of the peoples of the goddess. Blond hair, the pale summer tan of Lowlander, Shansar, Vardian. Amber eyes. If there was any trace of interbreeding, it was invisible.
The Warden of Zaddath sat in his carved chair, with Sorbel standing next to him.
Directly by Sorbel was another man, tall and strongly-proportioned, garbed like a Shansar prince.
The Warden had turned to him immediately.
“What do you say?”
The Shansarian fixed Rehger with an eagle’s look. The yellow eyes scorched and the mouth curled, and his ringed hands moved at his sides in a gesture of some recaptured motion and guidance—Rehger recognized it. He recognized the Shansar. Not his face or name certainly, but his person and the hour of meeting it.
It was Sorbel who spoke.
“He is claimed to be a slave of Alisaar, called the Lydian.”
“Yes,” said the Shansar. “Your hunting hound was clever.” He did not take his gaze from Rehger. “Neck and neck, Lydian. But I didn’t tell in Shansar, Rorn was angry. Since it was the anger of Anackire.”
The Warden cleared his throat. The Shansarian prince, who owned estates in Sh’alis and Karmiss and, once, had gone to Alisaar to race in the Fire Ride, turned and said, “Lord Warden, we were side by side, he and I, on the cliff above the sea. He remembers, too. That was what he mocked me with, Rorri, their nonexistent sea god, when his chariot broke from mine after the earth and the water shook. I would have won the race, but for this slave.”
“What do you say?” inquired the Warden of Rehger.
“He also raced in the Fire Ride, as he says. We were nearer to one another than we are now.”
“And you survived the destruction of the Saardsin city?” The Warden, the chamber, both were full of some hesitation, some unwillingness. “How?”
“In a shelter,” Rehger said, “on the Street of Tombs.”
“You refer to a grave.”
“He was at the funeral rites of his beloved,” cheeped Galutiyh from his corner. “Her rites.” At Rehger’s shoulder the Vardian officer shifted, but Sorbel remarked, “Be silent, Galutiyh. You think yourself too wise.” To Rehger, Sorbel said, in an abrupt harsh creak, “You’ll be asked to describe this escape.”
Rehger said, “I have to reassure you, my lords. If you’re wondering whether I, too, rose from the dead, I did not.” It was a perfect hit. Every man in the chamber reacted to it.
“There was a rumor,” said Sorbel, “some man of the arena, who was healed.”
Rehger said, “The woman you’re discussing was Amanackire. In Alisaar, all your blond race are reckoned sorcerers.”
“Galutiyh promises us,” snapped Sorbel, “that he captured you and forced you here as his prisoner. Please realize, your words and deeds will be scrutinized in the light of that.”
“I came with Galutiyh of my own accord.”
“Yet you were chained.”
Rehger said, “The Vardian officer there still has the chain. Perhaps he would return it to me.”
The Vardian, without waiting on response, smartly handed Rehger cuff and chain.
Rehger clasped the shackle on his wrist and taking hold of the other end of the chain, slowly pulled it outward from the cuff. In a few moments the links of the chain had altered shape, as if softening in a furnace. The men in the room regarded this spectacle silently, until the chain crunched from the cuff and Rehger dropped it on the floor. He broke the fastening of the cuff itself more quickly, threw that down also.
It was the Shansarian charioteer who then began uncouthly to applaud.
“This Vis dog brings the stadium to Zaddath. Cheer him. Let us make him a garland.”
“Let’s first of all discover,” said Sorbel, “what this garland is, that he desires. We have questions to put to him. But he has his own questions. Look at him. This man isn’t a slave. We think he knows some secret. He disdains our suspicions. Do we stretch him over coals, or whip him, maim him, and expect compliance?” Sorbel glared at Rehger. “Do you have the blood of the Plains People?”
“To my knowledge, no.”
Sorbel put his knotted fist to his throat.
“Do you, to your knowledge, have the blood of Raldnor Am Anackire?”
The chamber surged. The lamps flickered and flashed at the uneven breathing of men.
“Do I take you to mean am I descended from the bloodline of Raldnor? My mother was an Iscaian farm-woman wedded to a peasant in the mountain valleys.”
“What do you want?” Sorbel cried out shockingly, a sensitive who had lost control of diplomacy in the swirl of empathic vibrations.
“Is it so difficult to guess?” Rehger said. “The woman Aztira was known to me. Like yourselves, I wonder if she could live after death, in the flesh. And if so, where she’s gone to.”