It seemed he had legitimate business of some kind with the Ommos, Dakan, but the interesting thing about him was the talk he started of Lowland whores. Such a creature had never been seen, either in the city or out of it, yet the Lan claimed he had laid skinny blonde bitches galore, who, for a fee or a false promise of safety, would teach all manner of interesting bed tricks.
Riyul’s curiosity was whetted; his loins began to disturb him at the thought. Had there not been old stories of temple prostitutes?
Riyul’s name day fell in the gray time of the thaw. He had planned to have himself honored then by a makeshift feast in the palace hall, in the manner of a conqueror. He was playing at greatness, a dangerous silly game, in Amrek’s absence. Drunk, and lusting for white flesh suddenly in his smoky chamber, he sent the juggler word that if he valued garrison pickings, he had better make good his boast and provide it with some Lowland whores on the evening of the feast.
Yannul slept very deeply in the stagnant barracks that night. A cheerful madness had come on him with the continuance of the crazy acts he must commit. Vague thoughts of horror, of blood to come, he set aside. He had no choice. He had known as much when he rode across the alien summer landscape behind Raldnor, and sensed the stirrings of chaos underground.
His head heavy with the garrison wine, his last thoughts had also been of women, though in a temperate vein. Resha, his Alisaarian girl, for one, who had gone with a Vathcrian noble to live an unaccustomed life of order and fine clothes. She, who had initially feared racial enmity, had surprised Yannul by taking complacent refuge in camouflage. The Vathcrian had begun to pay her court in the last month at Vardath, when the nights were red from forge smoke and the roads rumbled with the passage of the great trees felled for ships. She must have learned early to survive and ride her chances aboard the Zakorian pirate. Now, a schooled opportunist, she accepted her suitor despite all obstacles, and the matter of his age, for he was well into his middle years—it made him a safer proposition, clearly. If it was her novelty that attracted him, however, the noble was to be sorely tried, for, once their union seemed likely, Resha had turned like a chameleon. She bleached her hair and began to use a face paint much like Dortharian Val Mala’s famous white unguent. Yannul rendered Resha all applause, and hoped her shaky house would stand. There had been no romance between them but a deal of liking. He only trusted her stout lover could keep pace with her through the dark.
Whatever else, he guessed she might be happier than the pale-haired girl, Jarred’s sister, they had wed to Raldnor at the altar of Ashkar Anackire. She had already the look of a woman who loved deeply and forever, but went unnoticed in return. Raldnor had been gentle with her, no doubt, but it would be an impersonal, automatic gentleness. And once the solitary month was up, he had left her and would probably never go back. A great pity, for she had been worth a second look, had Sulvian of Vathcri.
Asleep, Yannul dreamed of the farm in Lan. Snow thick on the hills, icicles stabbing from the roof. His mother happily heavy with child as she seemed perpetually to be, his sisters singing and squabbling at the loom, or nursing birds which had fallen, half-dead from the cold, beside the door. In the second thaw, three thin large-eyed girls holding out handfuls of wings. White birds soaring up from brown hands without a word of thanks; white birds turning black against the blue sky.
On the narrow pallet, Yannul dreamed of home. The ghosts of the palace left him alone.
Over the city the snow moon burned like a lamp of blazing ice. Sentries passed on the wall of the garrison, shivering and cursing.
“Do you hear that sound?” one asked the other.
“What sound? I can only hear my guts freezing.”
Yet he sensed also the electric movement of the air, less sound than vibration, a deaf thrumming under their feet, the twanging of a silent harp.
Somewhere, a wolf howled, sharp as a spike.
The sentry grinned.
“Do you remember that old man with the pet wolf—the black bitch Ganlik got with his spear? Lucky devil, Ganlik, with that pelt to wrap up in of a night.”
“I’ve heard Ganlik’s sick,” the other said.
They separated and moved on. A cloud choked out the moon.
And in Sar, Amrek dreamed of Astaris on the back of a white monster. Her hair bled over her shoulders, and her face was a golden skull.
20
Snow flamed on the wind. The wind was on fire with snow.
When the snow stopped, the Plains lay in unbroken whiteness under an exhausted purple sky.
The detachment of soldiers wound in a slow black rope across the blank whiteness of the land. Their business—the urgent provisioning of the garrison—was one they cursed in their various fashions. The makeshift pens, originally packed full of Lowland cattle stolen by Dortharians in warmer months, had grown progressively roomier as the occupation dragged on. Now the snow had come, while Amrek still took his ease in Sar, and the second Siege Snow would not be far behind it. There was talk they might even have to spend the winter here in this stinking verminous hole.
The detachment’s captain snarled out his orders and chafed his hands. Frozen to his very bones, he was thinking of a particular woman he had left behind in Dorthar, a bitch he was sure would find other amusements in his absence, and now had all the cold days to catch some filthy disease with which to present him on his return. In addition they had passed one farm holding and a village, both of which had been empty.
The second village showed itself to them two hours after noon, when the sky was already darkening drearily.
The gate in the stockade was wide. They rode through, and up the broad street, the men fanning out, stabbing open doors, peering into the musky gloom of stables and barns. Neither human nor beast remained. Shutters flapped and slapped at windows.
The hooves of the animals pushed the track into mud, and the swinging braziers spat pink phlegm.
A shadow ran suddenly out between the houses, its eyes a leap of flame. With hoarse nervous shouts men leveled spears at it.
“Wolf!”
But the thing vanished like a spirit.
“Ride on,” the captain bawled.
They overtook no one and found no footsteps in the snow.
The next village, the third, was nearer—only a mile or so.
Some plates lay broken in the road, partly covered by snow. A heavy silence welled up to meet them. They searched and found nothing. Once there came the whirr of a wheel on a loom, but it was the wind that turned it.
“They’re running,” the captain grunted. “Where?”
This time a few men slipped aside to see what might be picked up in the way of loot—people who moved in such apparent haste must surely leave valuables behind. They did not find a single metal ring. In the gloomy temple building not a golden scale remained.
Leaving the abandoned village, they strained their eyes for any sign of movement across the aching white waste of the Plains.
A luminous dusk soaked into the sky.
Far off, over the shadowy mirror of land, the captain glimpsed a thing, a shape, that might have been two men on zeebas, or only a trick of the gloaming. Fresh snow began to fall.
The captain sneezed and wiped his nose. He ordered the column back toward the deserted village and a chilly comfortless night’s camp.
On the scarp the two pale-haired men sat still on their zeebas, watching the Dortharians trample back through the stockade and, presently, the mauve smokes rise up.
The snow did not trouble them. The childhood of each had been spent in some holding of the Plains—their later life in the ruined city. For bread they had become the servants of Dakan the Ommos. They were well used to the raw cold and eternal hunger, and hardship of a hundred sorts.