On the far side of the bread-market the ridge rose sharply to a point where one could see the river far below, boiling and churning against the foot of the cliff. He strode toward it. Halefice still walked along beside him on the left, a step or two to the rear. Barjazid was on the other side. The Lord Gaviral did not seem to have followed them up the hill from the marketplace.
Mandralisca stood staring at the river for a long while without speaking. Then he drew the helmet from his pouch. It rested in the palm of his open hand, a bunched-up little mass of metal mesh. Barjazid gave him a worried look, as though wondering if Mandralisca might have it in mind to hurl it into the water below.
To the Suvraelinu he said suddenly, “Barjazid, did you ever want to kill your father?”
That drew a startled glance. “My father was a kindly man, your grace. A merchant who dealt in hides and dried beef, in Tolaghai city. It would never have entered my mind—”
“It entered mine, a thousand times a day. If my father were still alive now I’d put this helmet on and try to kill him with it right now.”
Barjazid was too astounded to answer. He and Halefice were both peering at him strangely.
Mandralisca had never spoken of these things with anyone. But those few seconds of using the Barjazid helmet had opened something in his soul, apparently.
“He was a merchant too,” he said. He looked straight out into the river gorge, and the hated past swam before his eyes. “In Ibykos, which is a muddy trifling little town in the scarp country of the Gonghars, a hundred miles west of Velathys. It rains there all summer and snows all winter. He dealt in wines and brandies, and was his own best customer, and when he was drunk, as almost always he was, he would hit you just as readily as look at you. That was how he talked to you, with his hands. It was in my boyhood that I learned to move as quickly as I do. To jump back fast—out of his reach.”
Even after nearly forty years Mandralisca could see that grim face, so much now like his own, in the eye of his mind. The long lean jaw, the clamped lips, the black scowl, the gathering brow; and the merciless hand flashing out, swift as a pungatan-whip, to split your lip or swell your cheek or blacken your eye. Sometimes the beatings had gone on and on and on, for the slightest of reasons, or for no reason at all. Mandralisca barely could summon up a recollection of his pallid, timid mother, but the monstrous brutal irascible father still rose like a mountain in his memory. Year after year of that, the curses, the backhand slaps, the sudden pokes and jabs and smacks, not only from him but from the other three too, his older brothers, who imitated their father by hitting anyone smaller than themselves. There had never been a day without its bruise, without its little ration of pain and humiliation.
He shut his fist on the helmet, squeezing it tight.
“Each night I sent myself to sleep by imagining I had murdered him that day. A knife in the gut, or poisoned wine, or a trip-wire in the dark and a hidden noose, I slew him fifty different ways. Until the day I told him out loud that I would do it if I got the chance, and I thought he was going to kill me there on the spot. But I was too fast for him, and when he had chased me from one end of the town to the other he gave up, warning me that he’d break me in half the next time he got his hands on me. But there never was a next time. A carter came by who was setting forth to Velathys, and he gave me a ride, and I have not seen the Gonghars since. I learned many years later that my father died in a brawl with a drunken patron in his shop. My brothers too are dead, I believe. Or so do I profoundly hope.”
“Did you go straight into the service of Dantirya Sambail, then?” Halefice asked him.
“Not then, no.” His tongue was loose, now. His face felt strangely flushed. “I went first to the western lands, to Narabal in the south, on the coast—I wanted to be warm, I wanted never to see snow again—and then to Til-omon, and Dulorn of the Ghayrogs, and many another place, until I found myself in Ni-moya and the Procurator chose me to be his cupbearer. I was in his bodyguard then, and he saw me at a demonstration of the batons—I am quick with the singlesticks, you know, quick with any sort of duelling weapon—and he called me out to talk with me after I had beaten six of his guardsmen in a row. And said to me, ‘I need a cupbearer, Mandralisca. Will you have the job?’ ”
“One did not refuse a man like Dantirya Sambail,” said Halefice piously.
“Why would I have refused? Did I think the task was beneath me? I was a country boy, Jacomin. He was the master of Zimroel; and I would stand at his side and hand him his wine, which meant I would be in his presence constantly. When he met with the great ones of the world, the dukes and counts and mayors, or even the Coronals and Pontifexes, I would be there.”
“And did you become his poison-taster then, also?”
“That came later. There was a whispered tale, that season, that the Procurator would be done to death by one of the sons of his cousin, who had been regent in Zimroel when Dantira Sambail was young, and had been put aside by him. It would be by poison, they said, poison in his wine. This talk came to the Procurator’s own ear; and when I handed him his wine-bowl the next time, he looked into it and then at me, and I knew he mistrusted it. So I said, by my own free will, because I mattered not at all to myself and he mattered a great deal, ‘Let me taste it first, milord Procurator, for safety’s sake.’ I have no liking for wine, on account of my father, you understand. But I tasted it, while Dantira Sambail watched, and we waited, and I did not fall down dead. And after that I tasted his wine with every bowl, to the end of his days. It was our custom, even though there were never any threats against him ever again. It was a bond between us, that I would sip a bit of his wine before I gave him the bowl. That is the only wine I have ever had, the wine I tasted on behalf of Dantirya Sambail.”
“You weren’t afraid?” asked Khaymak Barjazid.
Mandralisca turned to him with a scornful grin. “If I had died, what would that have mattered to me? It was a chance worth the taking. Was the life I was leading so precious to me that I would not risk it for the sake of becoming Dantirya Sambail’s companion? Is being alive such a sweet wondrous thing, that we should cling to it like misers clutching their bags of royals? I have never found it so.—In any case there was no poison in the wine, then or ever, obviously. And I was at his side forever after.”
If he had ever loved anyone, Mandralisca thought, that person was Dantirya Sambail. It was as if they shared a single spirit divided into two bodies. Though the Procurator had already managed to bring the entirety of Zimroel into his power before Mandralisca entered his service, it was Mandralisca who had spurred him on to the far greater enterprise of encouraging Confalume’s son Korsibar to seize the throne of Majipoor. With Korsibar as Coronal, and indebted to Dantirya Sambail for his crown, Dantirya Sambail would have been the most powerful figure in the world.
Well, it had not worked out, and both Korsibar and the Procurator were long gone. Dantirya Sambail had played and lost, and that was that. But for Mandralisca there were other games yet to play. He gently stroked the helmet in his hand.
Other games to play, yes. That was all existence was, really: a game. He alone had seen the truth of that, the thing that others failed to realize. You lived for a time, you played the game of life, ultimately you lost, and then there was nothing. But while you played, you played to win. Great wealth, fine possessions, grand palaces, feasting and the pleasures of the flesh and all of that, those things meant nothing to him, and less than nothing. They were only tokens of how well you had played; they had no merit in and of themselves. Even the wielding of power itself was a secondary thing, a means rather than an end.