All at once the Shansar was suffocating. Drowning.
He floundered, began to struggle, the gargantuan vitality of the berserker state beating like gavels—on the obduracy of bronze.
Rehger, his own vision blackened, his own lungs seeming to have collapsed flat as the rent skins of drums, held Kuzarl like a huge, fighting, insane child. Which grew sleepy, which ceased, inch by inch, second by second, to fight. ...
Locked together, idly revolvingly, they were gliding now down and downward.
Rehger felt the heavy head loll against him, the legs, the jeweled hands flexible as weeds—felt but could no longer see. And now could no longer feel.
He thrust against the water, to regain the in-jutting of the channel, the rocks and roots which all this while had grazed against him, falling. Rehger, holding Kuzarl now solely by the princely buckle of his belt, hauled them both, lightly cumbersome, unseeing, unreal, in a miasma or shadow, against the channel side. Using its leverage, Rehger launched himself, and the deadweight weightlessness of Kuzarl, upward—
Darkness. Of water, sight, mind. There was no end to the dark, or the shadow. To the water, no end. Subsurface, the channel must have spread. They were in under the rock, buried, in a stone river.
Whiteness blasted across his face. The air shrilled into his lungs like knives. He could not make them take it, and then—could not get enough.
Vision was senseless—They were still inside the water. Vertically now, it lanced upon him. Rain. And the fire was out.
Under the rain, and the sullen sky snagged on remnants of the forest roof, Rehger rolled the Shansar on his face and worked the river out of his chest and guts.
The blood-desire had faded as his own life ebbed. It would have been easy to continue dropping down into oblivion and night. But only now, surely, did he think it easy, now when he had brought both of them back from it alive.
Kuzarl, lying breathing on his side, looked at Rehger with inflamed, gentle eyes.
“That’s not the last of it,” said Kuzarl Am Shansar.
The boat was gone. The Shansarian servant, the Var-Zakor—neither had reappeared. The rain fell. The sky guttered out.
Rehger did not answer Kuzarl.
Kuzarl said, hoarsely, “The Three Ordeals, to find out guilt or innocence, or the victory, or the essence of what must be. Fire, water, steel. Not always in that order. The hero Raldnor passed through them. The steel of the assassin. Tempest. Volcano.”
“Save yourself,” said Rehger. “We’ve some way to go yet, I imagine.”
“I don’t speak of facts, but of truths.”
“Shansar truths.”
“The Fire Ride—That was the fire, repeated here, you and I. And for you the fire in the sea, like Raldnor, and the wave that had your slave-city—an ordeal of water. And steel, every one of your duels before the mob. But one more time, the steel, with me.” Kuzarl was not yet properly returned to his body to be quelled by its discomfort.
Rehger said: “On your terms, I killed you in the river. You’re bested. Your reptile goddess gave you to me.
Rehger’s eyes, and face, were composed. He spoke without malice or gluttony.
But Kuzarl said, “You killed me and restored me. You kept me for the steel, as she kept you.”
“Anackire.”
“Anackire. ”
“If she exists, your goddess, if she is what your people and her own people say, if she is Everything, if she is all places and times, this land, this weather, all men, you, and I, then we’re much to be blamed, Shansarian. We botched the world. We made it ill and wrongly, and deserve the disaster and the misery of it. Get up. Let’s get on wherever you reckon we’re going. If your philosophy’s accurate, what does it matter?”
But Kuzarl only nodded and rose to his feet quite steadily. His jewelry had ceased to shine, but his eyes had become once again polished, luminous amber.
“Why do the children play games?” said Kuzarl. “Isn’t it unkind and unbecoming to prevent them, even when they bruise their limbs or sometimes hurt their companions. Children must play. And why should we think so?”
Rehger only waited. Kuzarl gestured indolently upriver, westward.
Through the rain, the burnt charcoal fringes of the forest, along the riverbank, westward, they went.
The tangle of trees, miles and days beyond the fire, shut the river. Only the pinnacles of the mountains sometimes showed. They seemed intrinsic not to the earth, but to the sky.
It was possible to snare lizards in the muddy, silty places which the river had left behind. The water which was available was full of salts. In preference, they sliced the stems of ferns and drank their sour vegetable milk.
The now-and-then visibility of the mountains, the passaging of daylight, guided them west.
Aside from necessities, they did not speak.
Their individual endurance and rate of progress was not competitive. They had been welded into a bizarre union. As if by prearrangement, if not the plan of Anackire, all else was removed from them, and there was at last no doubt that a goal existed and would be achieved. Despite the brawl under the river, neither man was impaired, or had given up his wits. The hard common sense of savagery was on them now.
In the middle of a day, conceivably the fifteenth or sixteenth after the fire (or it might have been longer), the Lydian, who was ahead of the Shansar, cut his way through the continuous forest fence into a clearing so wide its farther extremes were out of sight. It was not the conclusion of the jungles for, far off, they lifted up again into the sunlight, like mounds of a blue haze, and ghosts of the mountaintops were anchored over them, southerly, though no longer to the north.
In the. clearing was a town.
Having subsisted some time on tasteless and infrequent meat and the resin of ferns, maybe the oddity of the town was simply perspective, transposed.
It had a strain of Ott, of Thaddra, too. The buildings were of mud and had grown together in the manner of a hive. Carving stuck out of the thatches. Wooden birds roosted there, perhaps for good fortune. Then one of these carvings shook its feathers. A flightless fowl was tending its nest. The town seemed to have no proper relation to the jungle-forest. Its people did not stare at the two travelers, only gave them occasional glances.
In a square was a market, where they were able, surprisingly with coins, to get food.
At one side of the square, regardless of other business, a custom of Ott went on, a Death Feast, at a long table. In the seat of honor, embalmed and dressed in its best, the cadaver sat overlooking the feasters with indigo eyelids. The Otts toasted the deathshead and invited passersby to quench their thirst; Rehger and Kuzarl were among these. The beer was potent. Nothing, in any case, seemed truly curious to them, or real.
As dusk came on in a preface of light, a red star appeared in the wide dome over the clearing. It was the first night of Zastis.
“Still the fire,” said Kuzarl.
They were seated on a tavern roof, under the awning woven of leaves. An outrider of a night breeze tried the awning, feathering the leaves, the movement of a wing. They might have lived in the town many years.
Down in the square, the funeral had just disbanded. The figure of Death, a man dressed as a woman, and all in white, had appeared to lead the dead away for burial, with happy songs and jests.
Kuzarl’s blond head was back, to gaze at the Star. “Your Zastis doesn’t trouble my kind. They have no special hunger. All Shansars will tell you so, as they rush for the brothel door. No, no. Transparent lust is the mark of the Vis.”
Rehger watched the last of the funeral party. The stirring in his blood was remote, but he had been aware of it for days, realizing the season. He was accustomed to containment, or to the alternatives of action. The combat in the river, even so long ago, had been tinged by some premonition of the Star.