Amnorh turned his head and saw a girl kneeling beside him. She had a brown peasant face and too-big, simple eyes.
“I thought you were a devil out of the hill,” she said conversationally. “I went in there once, and there was a light, and I ran away.” She ogled him. “But you’re only a man.”
He sat up. The hot sun had already dried his garments. How long had he lain here with this laborer’s bitch watching him? He glanced apprehensively at the bundle of his cloak, but it seemed undisturbed.
“Are you going to Thaddra, across the mountains?”
“Yes,” he said shortly.
“There’ll be men going there over the pass. Our farm’s just down the slope. Will you wait there for them?”
Amnorh looked at her. It would be reasonable to travel in company. He had no provisions, and an early snow might soon lock the mountains in walls of ice. There were also bandits on the mountain shelves.
The farm was little better than a hovel. A bony cow picked at yellow grass outside, and there was an old man minus eyes sitting like a dried-out insect against the wall.
Amnorh waited in the shade of the house while the girl went about her tasks. The traders did not come. He wondered if she had dreamed them up to keep him here for some villainous purpose, but she seemed too stupid for that. He tried to question the old man, but he was apparently deaf as well as eyeless.
In the cool of evening the girl gave him bread and cheese and watered-down milk. When he had finished, she sat close to him and put her hand on his thigh.
“I’ll be friendly with you, if you like. I’ll do whatever you want if you give me something.”
So, she was whoring to supplement the leanness of the living. He gripped her shoulder roughly.
“Were you lying to me about the travelers?”
“No—no—tomorrow they’ll come.”
“You’d better be speaking the truth.”
He pushed her away and lay down to sleep, the bundle an awkward pillow under his head.
He slept long and deeply, weary to his bones. Near dawn there was a dream.
The Lady of Snakes came out of the hill and slithered down the slope into the hut. She wrapped him in her coils and in her arms and in her spitting glinting snake-hair, and he played with her the games of lust which Ashne’e had taught him.
A fierce needle of sunlight burned on his eyes and woke him; the travelers had come.
“There was rioting and a fire in the city,” one of the men said to him.
Amnorh glanced back toward Koramvis, a toy of white towers between the jut and fall of the hills. He turned away, and for the first time an anguished frustration and a bitter despair ignited in his heart. The Lord Warden had indeed perished beneath Ibron.
“Everything is lost,” he thought. “Only I remain. And I—I no longer exist.”
The seated Garrison chariot rattled from the Plain Gate of Koramvis in the black hour before dawn. Amun, a charioteer who had once won races in the arenas of Zakoris, bypassed the ways of the riot, yet they heard the distant belling on the wind and smelled the smoke. Liun’s face was set and unreadable, but he muttered: “On occasion a man wishes the gods had made him a rabbit or an ox—anything rather than a man.”
Lomandra held the child close to her, but it made no sound. She felt some dim yet awful presence over the city. “This act will bring its own retribution,” she thought. And she prayed the girl had been dead when the mob came for her, as Ashne’e had told her she would be.
They traveled across Dorthar, arid and golden in the last conflagration of the summer, across the broad river into Ommos, where perfumed pretty boys squealed at the chariot, and the Zarok statues now and then consumed in their furnaces the flesh of unwanted girl children. At a little eating house they saw a fire-dancer strip her flimsy garments from her body with a live brand.
“A symbol,” Lomandra thought. “So it is with my life.”
Yet, as they passed into Xarabiss, the tension and the sourness left her. She felt liberated, almost at peace. As so often before on the journey, she examined the child, and no longer observed it with fear. What would it become? she wondered. Most probably some peasant—hunter or farmer—sweating out its days, unaware of the turmoil and ancestry that had formed it. Or perhaps it would die young. Should she herself keep it, she asked herself now, rear it and give it whatever status and wealth she could acquire? She felt an immediate aversion to the plan. Despite the compassion she experienced, there was the imposition of another’s will, a sort of geas laid on her. This baby was not Xarabic, nor hers. She had no place in her life, whatever that might be, for this curious and terrible stranger. And Ashne’e, it seemed, had known and approved that fact.
The first cold rain of the year came at sunset in Tyrai, about ten miles from the border.
She had fed the child with milk, while the storm beat like birds on the shutters and finally fell quiet. Red slanting strokes of the tumbling sun pierced afterward into the room. A knock came on the door, and when she opened it, Liun stood in the doorway. It was the first time either of the men had come to find her after the day’s traveling. She thought something must have happened and alarm clutched at her pulses.
“Is anything wrong?”
“No, nothing at all. I’m sorry if I made you think so.”
He came into the room with a directness that was at the same time somehow diffident, and crossed to the cot as though this were an excuse for entering.
“A quiet child, thank the gods.”
“Yes, he has always been quiet. As she was.”
“And you,” he said, exactly as Kren had said it, “what of you?”
“I shall make a home in my own land when I’ve done what she asked me.”
“Xarabiss. Yes. You should never have left it.”
“Perhaps not.”
He opened a shutter on the cool red air. Awkwardly he said: “Did you wonder why I was the second man in the chariot?”
“Kren promised me an escort I could trust.”
“I asked to accompany you.”
She looked at him, surprised.
“Why should you do that?”
“I suppose I’d be a fool to suppose you’d understand such a thing. I never dared to speak to you in Koramvis.”
“Speak of what?”
He flushed slightly and smiled without humor, still not looking at her.
“That I desired the Queen’s chief lady. What, after all, was the use? A mere captain existing on army pay.”
A flood of quite unexpected warmth ran through her. Something she had never considered before, she found, had the power to lift her off her feet. She felt like a very young girl, a ghost of herself in Xarabiss. Her hands trembled and she let out an unconsidered sparkling laughter.
“But I have nothing now,” she said.
He looked at her then, his face full of amazement.
“Kren would release me,” he said breathlessly. “I have enough put by to get a villa-farm, to hire men; it could be a good living, here or in Karmiss. But such a life would be horrible to you.”
“Dorthar was horrible to me and the things of Dorthar. Oh, yes, Liun, I could breathe in the life you offer me. And I can get money to help you.”
They were both laughing, unreasonably, happily. He came to her and his eyes were very bright.
“Oh, what am I doing?” she asked herself, but nothing seemed to matter except this strong young man with his bright eyes and the sense of hope that clung about him. He was younger than she, but it was irrelevant suddenly. “You are not a thirteen-year-old virgin to tremble like this,” she thought as a little clumsily, yet gently, he lifted the thick hair back from her cheek and kissed it. How could she have longed for this and not known it?