The other, second visitor was less welcome; she came in the night and crumbled across his dreams in the consuming fire of her burial. He began to dread sleep. Orhvan had left the wolf pelt when he came, and sometimes in the dark the glimmer of its whiteness seemed like her hair across his bed. Her very innocence had grown evil with the haunting.
Immured in the apartment building, he heard nothing of the city outside. Even Orhvan’s ominous despair had had no impact on him, and, besides, alienated from his people as always and for the first time befriended by a Vis, he felt himself truly Xarabian and one with the crowd of Lin Abissa.
Yet on the eighth evening of his lethargy, a boy came running up the stairs and pounded on Xaros’s door.
“What’s this, you hooligan?” Xaros demanded, and Raldnor thought he recognized the child as the son of the landlord and his wife, who lived a flight down.
“Xaros—soldiers—Dortharians—”
“Certainly. Get your breath back.”
The boy gasped a little, swallowed and resumed:
“Svarl saw Dortharian soldiers on Slant Street, asking for a Lowland man with a finger missing on his left hand. He told me to tell you someone directed them here.”
Xaros gave the boy a coin and packed him off; then, turning to Helida, he said: “Sweetheart, go and appropriate old Solfina’s hair dye,” and Helida went out, presumably to obey this curious order, without a word.
“I’ll leave at once,” Raldnor said, starting up in a sort of sick madness of action.
“And meet the dragons on the street? Oh, no, my impetuous friend. From this moment you’ll do exactly as I say. Oh, my darling Helida, how swift of you. Now we’ll make this yellow stuff a respectable color.”
Raldnor protested as Xaros plastered the jet black paste onto his hair, and Helida applied jugfuls of barely warm water.
“He struggles like an eel. Keep still while I attend to your eyebrows.”
“Will this paint wash off?” Raldnor demanded, stunned and made almost submissive by indignity.
“Wash off? Gods and goddesses—Do you suppose all the elderly black-haired ladies you see in the street would pay out their funds to be unmasked by the first rain?”
They toweled his hair before the fire.
“A rough imperfect job of work,” Xaros commented. “Now into your bed, under the covers and shut your eyes. It’s true certain Dortharians have yellow eyes—their famous king Rarnammon for one—but I can hardly pass you off as him. And say nothing, though an occasional groan I will allow you.”
At which moment, new and heavier footfalls, the unmistakable sound of mail, clashed on the stairs.
The imperative knock came seconds later. Xaros opened the door and feigned amazement.
“To what do I owe this honor?”
“No honor, Xarab. You’ve a man here—”
“Why, yes. How singularly clever of you to know—”
“A Lowlander.”
Xaros raised his eyebrows.
“Indeed no, soldier. I spit on such scum.”
“Oh yes? Then who’s the man?”
“My brother, sir. Prey to a strange affliction; the physician is entirely baffled.”
The two Dortharians thrust by him and flung open the door of the second room. They saw a dark-haired man, apparently asleep in the bed, and a Xarabian woman drooped at the bedside in an attitude of weary despair.
“I must beg you, sir, not to disturb the poor fellow. Additionally,” Xaros muttered with pathos, “the fever is highly contagious.”
The soldier nearest the bed checked his stride.
“Have you reported his sickness to the authorities?”
“Naturally, sir,” Xaros murmured.
“Damnation,” snarled the Dortharian in the doorway. “You were born of a lying race, Xarab. I’ll skin those rats in Slant Street if I catch them.”
“Liars abound,” Xaros remarked sententiously.
The two men pushed their way past.
“What had the Lowlander done to displease you, magnificent sir?”
“That’s my affair. I owe him something.”
Xaros ushered them out and called solicitously after them to mind their step on the lower stairs, then shut the door—and leaned thereon in the helpless mirth of self-applause.
“I’m in your debt for my life,” Raldnor said. It had been easy enough to feign illness in that room, so close to a piece of death.
“So you are. But, more to the point, don’t you think, Helida, that he makes a remarkably good Vis?”
And later, when Raldnor stared at himself in Helida’s glass, another man looked back at him. Something irreparable had occurred—it stretched quite beyond the incident. For it seemed to him he was no longer Raldnor, certainly no longer the Raldnor he had known. And the planes of his face were comfortable and apt, their hauteur set now in this darkness. He seemed to discover himself for what he was. “I am easy with this stranger,” he thought. “He never knew the crippling of a deaf mind, nor the unwilling Lowland girls; not even the white crystal girl of the Lowlander’s sleep. I am Vis now, truly Vis. Is this the legacy my mother intended? Out of an old whore’s dye bottle?”
He took up the wolf pelt in the morning and went out to sell it. The streets ran with the rain of the thaw, but he did not think of Orhvan’s wagon negotiating the unfriendly mud, nor of the ruined city; in a way he had renounced them. And he walked arrogantly, unafraid. Since he had seen the Dortharian soldier spit from the courtyard after them, a hidden part of him had been uneasy to move about these streets, though he had not owned this.
Yet near the furriers Xaros had recommended, he passed across the Red Market and saw five women up for sale to the whorehouses.
Four were pert faced and untroubled enough, flirting with the crowd—black-haired tarts already from the look of them. The fifth was a Lowland woman, dressed in a coarse shift.
Raldnor stared at that familiar and unreadable face he knew so well from the villages. And then, incredibly, it seemed their minds touched, for her head jerked up and she scanned the crowd. Yet he was not strong or adept enough to hold their accidental contact; he did not know how. And she, seeing only dark men about her, relapsed into gray immobility.
Yet the mob, mostly louts with some Ommos and Dortharian men among them, began to jeer at her.
“Looking for me, you yellow mare? I’ll ride you!”
Sudden cold fear dropped over Raldnor. He began to shiver. With an impulse of agonized cowardice, he turned and pushed a way across the square.
He reached the furriers with a sense of horror still on him.
The shop was lofty and dim, and smelled of its wares. He snatched up a handbell and rang it sharply, and the merchant emerged like a shade from a crevice in the wall.
“My lord?” His voice was oddly fawning, unctuous. Raldnor was marvelously surprised to be addressed in such a voice.
“This,” he said; he opened the cloth and spread the pelt on the counter in a spool of icy flame.
The merchant betrayed himself with a sharp intake of breath. Then, mastering himself, he said: “A fine skin. Indeed yes. You bleached it?”
“I didn’t touch it. This was a white wolf.”
The merchant gave a little laugh, as if amused by a favorite child.
“Ah, my lord. A wolf pelt of this size, and so white?”
“If you’ve no taste for my goods, I’ll go elsewhere.”
“Wait, my lord—indeed—you’re too hasty. Possibly it’s as you say. But I’ve no recollection of a hunter trapping such a thing for years.”