“Among us a priest is not numbered as a man.”
“So we see. Well, you’re here. What causes you to trouble the Storm Lord?”
Without seeing them, he sensed the six eyes of the priests fixed on him. He was not as contemptuous as he seemed, knowing as he did of certain powers sometimes manifested in these serfs, and peculiar magics. He wondered if they now conferred together inside their heads as they were reputed to do.
“Your lord desires to lie with Ashne’e. We ask him to take another woman from the village.”
So she was called Ashne’e. A common enough name among Lowland women.
“Why?”
“The woman belongs to our temple. She is ours, and Hers.”
“Hers? I take it you mean your serpent goddess.”
“Ashne’e has been given to the goddess.”
“So. The Storm Lord will pardon you that the girl’s no longer virgin. I imagine this is what you intimate.”
He thought they would speak again, but they were silent.
“Go back to your temple,” Rehdon suddenly snarled at them.
In the bowl sky, thunder burned.
Without a word the priests turned; making no sound, they slipped one by one into the dark.
The fires were almost out, smears in the night world, when they brought the girl to Rehdon’s tent.
In the half-light she was unhuman. The low flame of a tent torch filled one eye with gold, freckled her cheek as though she wept fire.
The men sidled out and were gone.
Rehdon trembled with his need. He took the edge of her robe in his fingers, recalling what Amnorh had said to him.
“You’re from the temple, Ashne’e?”
“Yes.” There was no color in her voice.
“You know the bed lore of the temple women then.”
He pulled the garment from her. She stood before him naked. His hand moved on her, hesitated on her chill breasts. He drew her to the torch, examined her. An evanescent beauty, which a very little would swiftly destroy. High breasts, cold, for they were capped with gilt. In her navel a drop of yellow resin spat. The resin excited him unreasonably; it might have been a third eye, this time of her sex. He cupped her sexual hair, rough as the spun metal it resembled.
“Are you afraid of me?”
She said nothing, but her eyes expanded as if with tears.
Unable to resist the impulse of the star he pulled her down with him on to the couch, but somehow she twisted as she came and was above him. He saw then the expansion of her eyes was pure luminosity, they were glowing, awful as the eyes of a tirr, or a banalik crouched now to suck out his soul.
His head reeled with amazing fear, but he found in a second more that she knew those things which Amnorh had promised. He could not evade her will, floundered gasping in her snake’s coils, until the night became a dream of fire between the surges of which came the intoxicated thought he must keep her by him forever after, to terrify and delight him and pull him struggling and groaning into the spinning pit of her womb.
Dawn came, cool before the day’s heat, with a beat of bird’s wings over the trees.
Amnorh folded back the flap of the King’s tent, and stood a moment regarding the sleeping girl, her face turned into the cushions, first light licking her bone-pale back.
The King lay on his side, apparently locked deep in sleep, yet, as Amnorh had already noted, his black eyes were wide open. Amnorh crossed to him, reached and shook the Storm Lord’s shoulder, presently slapped the bloodless mouth. The glazed eyes were fixed far beyond this insolence. Rehdon, Dragon King, whose new heir had lain two months in the body of his queen at Koramvis, whose other earlier heirs by lesser queens slunk about the palace courts in dozens, lay dead apparently from a casual Zastian coition.
Amnorh left the tent. He cried out wordlessly into the morning air, rousing men bleary-eyed from the embers of their fires. Two guards ran to him.
“In the tent,” Amnorh said harshly. “Our Lord Rehdon is dead. The bitch-witch is still sleeping. Bring her out here.”
He saw the horror start up in the guards’ eyes. They ran into the tent, the flap did not fall back into place. He saw them balk at Rehdon’s corpse, then lean and drag Ashne’e from the couch. She seemed limp, yet when they dropped her before him on the ground, her eyes came open, staring up into his. She made no move either to rise or to cover herself.
“Abomination,” Amnorh hissed at her, “you have murdered a King.”
One of the guards lifted his spear.
“Wait!” Amnorh rasped. “There’s more to this.”
“No doubt.”
Amnorh glanced up and registered the tall figure of Orhn Am Alisaar, fully alert, a drawn knife ready in his hand.
“What’s this panic for?”
“The Storm Lord is dead,” Amnorh said, his eyes reduced to slits.
“Damnation take your tongue. I’ll see that first.”
“My lord prince is very welcome to judge for himself.”
Amnorh stepped aside from the tent mouth; Orhn strode by him and inside. Amnorh watched him shake Rehdon’s body, speak to it and finally let it subside. Orhn straightened, turned and came out. He glared for the first time with dry pitiless eyes at the girl Ashne’e.
“Who?”
“A whore from the temple. Has your lordship forgotten—”
“Yes. I’d forgotten.”
Orhn kneeled abruptly, caught her face in a cruel grip so that her eyes were forced to his.
“And what did you do, temple witch? Do you know who this man was before you killed him? Storm Lord, High King—Look at me!”
Her gaze had slipped to Amnorh, and then, suddenly her eyes turned up and the lids fell over them as if in a fit. Orhn felt her skin grow chill under his hand and let her go, thinking she had fainted. Amnorh knew otherwise, said nothing.
Orhn got to his feet.
“No time for ceremony,” he said, “I’ll dispatch her now.” He stared upward at the pale sun newly risen, which already masked the inflamed star. “The Red Moon was a curse to Rehdon,” he said. “He was no longer a young man.” The knife shone in his hand.
“However, lord prince, there’s one thing we forget,” Amnorh said softly.
Orhn looked full at him.
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, yes, my lord. It’s possible—merely possible—that Rehdon’s child is planted in this inferior body.”
A deeper, more intense silence fell around them. The men stiffened in attitudes of almost superstitious unease.
“She may have used the way of women to stop it,” Orhn said.
“How can we be sure? There is no suitable test, lord prince. And permit me to remind you, my lord, that the last child conceived before the death of the king becomes, by the laws of Rarnammon, his ultimate heir.”
“Not a by-blow on a peasant—the yellow scum-race of the Plains—”
“Indeed, my lord, but dare we alone decide the matter?”
Orhn’s eyes were flint; the contemptuous distaste he felt for Amnorh suffused his face like a blush.
“My authority should be enough—”
“Lord Orhn!” a man cried suddenly.
On a low scarp a few yards away a guard waved his arm, then pointed off across the fields.
Orhn turned and saw a dust cloud whirling up from the slopes.
“What now?”
“The village men,” Amnorh said softly, “perhaps returning?”
Orhn moved with long strides up the side of the scarp and stood beside the guard, Amnorh following more leisurely.
Sunlight touched the dust to silver, made it hard to distinguish shape inside the shining blur.
“How many men to kick up that much dust?” Orhn snapped. “Fifty? Sixty?”
“But they are only serfs, as you pointed out, lord prince,” Amnorh murmured succinctly.