One sunup, two of the Zakors were missing. Their remains were soon found. A huge snake, which had left evidence of its passage through the undergrowth, had crushed them, and devoured one, leaving only his metal ornaments and boots. On the other, birds and reptiles were feeding. Where blood had run into the flowers, they had lowered their calyxes thirstily.
Some of the men were very afraid. The notion of a serpent now was not only physically but psychically threatening.
“Return then,” said Kuzarl, straddling the serpent’s trail with princely defiance. “Know the way? By Ashkar, I supposed not. Come on, then.”
That night Kuzarl said to Rehger, “The Lowlanders burn their dead. This custom is upheld as an acceptance that flesh has been doffed, the spirit flown away. But I detect another origin. They use flames to prevent resurrection.”
Kuzarl’s band now numbered thirteen. They mounted a strict watch by night.
The Shansarian servants obviously found the dripping molten heat oppressive. Kuzarl, reared, he said, in Sh’alis, was rather more enduring. Maybe a month and a half was gone, since they had left Zaddath.
They crossed a swamp by a Zakorian bridge, partly unsafe. Thrown out on the edge was a massive skeleton, a palutorvus, or some thing even older. Fever stalked the camp, taking up both of Kuzarl’s Shansars, three of the Var-Zakors with mix blood. They lay up a day or two. The fevers went down and the oaths held.
Rehger opened his eyes.
“What?”
“Not,” said Kuzarl, “more snakes. But I’ll show you.”
Aside from the dutiful watchman, the rest of the camp slept, not yet troubled by flies. The dawn was starting, back the way they had come.
Kuzarl plucked through the ferns and creepers under a ribcage of trees. At the end, as they had suspected the previous night, was another of the deserted villages. Rather than antique, however, it was quite recent and had not entirely submerged. The huts had become bushes, but a stone pillar-oven, of the oldest type of the shrines of the fire god, braced itself on a step of baked clay. Kuzarl pointed to the foot of the step, where he had previously pulled the creepers aside. A sort of wooden pin had been sunk in the soil, and daubed white. It had something of a face and a veil or mane of bleached human hair.
“A shrine to Zarduk, and a shrine to Aztira,” said Kuzarl. “Do you see where the underside of the clay is marked? They were making sacrifice to her. Burnt meats.”
The sunrise poured past Rehger’s body, into the lost village. He looked at the daubed pin Aztira. The night of her burial, he had stood before the altar of the Shalian temple, and promised an offering to the snake-fish goddess, for Aztira’s peace. He had never made this offering. Instead, all Saardsinmey had made it, consumed on the altar, flushed by the lustral of the sea.
A slow storm of hatred moved in him. He was now accustomed to this. It had commenced on the ship of Arn Yr, and in the studio of Vanek it had dulled down, aching only now and then, as the scar on his arm never did. But that third life at Moiyah, that had been sundered also, the life of the artisan. As he came west, again the hate burgeoned, deepened, and had by now perhaps possessed him.
“She passed them by here, then,” Rehger said.
“Seemingly. These primitives could never have heard of her otherwise.”
For my self, I loved you, from the moment I saw you I believe.
The picture returned to him, through the present image of the wooden pin, the image he himself had been forming from marble; and the image of her lovely deadness on the couch, as if she slept.
The hatred engorged him, like desire.
Kuzarl said, “Be wary, Rehger. I told you, the mind-speech isn’t quite unknown to you. Your brain thunders, and deafens me.”
“And the words?”
“No words. Does a screaming baby have words?”
Rehger lifted his eyes and looked off through the smothering village.
“When asked so surprisingly in Zaddath, if you were of the line of Raldnor,” said Kuzarl, “you replied, pedantically, that you took them to mean the line of his sons. Evasion?”
“Mind-read it,” said Rehger. “If you’re able.”
“No need. I put together two blatant themes. You have the appearance of the line of the first Ramammon, the Dortharian Storm Lords. You are not Raldnor’s. You descend then from the seed of his half-brother. Amrek’s get.”
Rehger turned from the village.
“She told me so.”
He had been repelled by her at the beginning. That whiteness. He would harm no woman. But she was not human. He had cut her from the marble, wrung her neck in the wax.
Rehger said to Kuzarl, “A Moiyan sculptor used me as the model for a statue of Raldnor. Taken into Xarabiss an accident befell the stone. All trace of the features was splintered from the countenance.”
Sword into snake. Snake into woman. A serpent, which sloughed its skin and crawled out from the black hole under the boulder . . . something so beautiful—
Rehger leaned down and wrenched the daubed peg from the earth. He cast it away over the village.
There was a normalcy of sound growing behind them, in the camp. The cook clattered his pots and sang.
Kuzarl said, “Tradition dictates, Rehger Am Amrek, we’re enemies. You knew it, and have spoken it.”
“A combat then, Shansarian. As and when you wish.”
“The goddess will demonstrate the time and place.”
“Your goddess is a demon of the air. Your wanting it will make the time and place.”
Kuzarl bowed, a hint of the codes of Karmiss despite everything.
Not a bird or insect made its noises in the foliage about them.
They want back easily to the camp, pacted, as if nothing at all had happened.
The first wilderness ended in the towns and villages, the cleared and fertile marshes and flax-sumps of the Var-Zakorian west. There were now consistent vistas, on one of which the mountains marched away over the southern horizon.
There had been no route to the Great Sea-Lake in the days of Old Zakoris. Corhl and Ott had used this enclosed sprat of an ocean for fishing trade and piracy upon each other. But now a couple of Vardish roads rambled to the shore.
Kuzarl’s party, again, had been depleted by this juncture. Five Var-Zakors, despite the desperate oath, had vanished at the first town beyond the forest. “Tested in fire,” remarked Kuzarl, “the flawed metal breaks.
Such vermin we shan’t be saddled with in the depths of Thaddra.”
At a fishing port on the rim of the Lake, one of Kuzarl’s servants found out an Ottish captain, due to take his twenty-oared galley across to Ottamet and Put. Kuzarl drew a map in the sandy soil with his daggar. “There and here, the Ott-towns, and here, or here, a river which runs off through the mountains northwest, where we are going.” So it was settled.
The water of the Sea-Lake gleamed like glass under a high sun, and far out fish were leaping.
The Ottish captain and his men took that for some favorable omen, and trotted instantly to the galley. Kuzarl and Rehger went aboard, but the rest, dawdling in the port, were almost left behind. The Karmian cook railed against the Otts as savages. But their ears were thick with their own dialect and they chose to ignore the faces he pulled, smiling and chattering and nodding in reply.
Ottamet, the capital, was a thatched wooden town, painted scarlet, rose and cream, with brilliant blue jetties of obscure religious meaning, that prodded half a mile into the paler blue of the waves. The sea was tidal but calm, and there had been a strong breeze on the body of the water. The crossing had taken little more than a day. From Ottamet, the galley turned north, flattering the coast. Miniature Ott also had been flinging territorial nets, and advanced in patches up along the Sea-Lake until a wide rivermouth checked her. Here was Put, wooden and thatched, rouged and jettied. Wild parrots nested in the roofs, screeching and squawking. The echoing omnipotence of the black jungle-forest loomed and towered behind. The river estuary, a swamp pillared by colossal reeds, choked up with sand banks, islets and hot springs, sent a quavering fume into the sky. It was possible to get through, carrying a light vessel upended overland, until the main channel of the river won free. No man of Ott wished to go that way, but several were willing to sell all manner of boats.