It was a strange time, for already the forces of disruption were at work, and men felt that weird quickening, either in their bones or in their souls. Even so early, no single thing could stay quite as it had been. Soon everything would be altered, swept away; only in realignment and great change could anything remain.
In Koramvis, in the third month, the snow held like stone.
In this bitter weather, the Queen’s woman, Dathnat, her own face pinched and wooden, worked longer upon the Queen’s flesh with her creams. Val Mala, sensing in the snow an enemy, kept much to her apartments. She no longer wore the white unguent. In the harsh, pale light of the winter days her golden skin seemed brittle and papery. Nothing amused her.
“I begin to tell myself old tales, like an old woman,” she thought. “I. I.”
She had been thinking of Rehdon, not so much as a man, but as the personification of her disappointment in him. It was a sour taste in her mouth when she recalled how he had come to her father’s palace at Kuma.
Her father was the Guardian of the place, a small and unimportant merchant town with squat towers like squashed cakes. It lay in the path of one of Rehdon’s progresses; otherwise, doubtless, he would never have considered entering it. Val Mala had hated Kuma, and she had hated her carefully preserved virginity. Her countless lovers did their best to serve her, in their own way, and after every Zastis her nurses came, with their prodding fingers, to ensure that matters had not gone too far. Such were the sexual customs of her house.
On the evening before Rehdon’s arrival, her women had chattered ceaselessly, hysterical with excitement. They had all manner of tales concerning him. Tales of his power and beauty, and burning eyes that could strip a woman literally quite naked—a magic thing which they had been assured he had once done. For the occasion of his visit, Val Mala had been made a dress of glassy stuff sewn all over with golden flowers, and her hair had been plaited in twenty stiff braids woven through with pearls.
The sun rose. The palace woke and grew frenzied with anticipation, and Val Mala, accompanied by thirteen ladies in matching gowns of blush-red silk, had been taken to the head of the city wall. From here, she was told, she might look down and throw flowers decorously to Rehdon’s chariot. She had been instructed in everything, but she waited at the wall, breathless in her anxiety that he should look up at her.
The long brazen river of men seemed to wind endlessly in through the gates of Kuma. At last she saw his vehicle, quite unmistakably ornate. She leaned forward and flung the blossoms from her hands, and called out to him—only his name, which was enough, as it turned out.
Above the hubbub, her clear high youthful voice had reached him, and he lifted his head and looked into her eyes. In those days Rehdon, though many years her senior, had been a giant—handsome, almost godlike, a magnificent product of his line. The sight of him struck her deliciously dumb. Her whole body ached for him with sudden wild longing.
Later, she lay in the dark, watching the lights of passing sentries quiver on the domed ceiling, and she imagined, with uncontrollable intensity, the ecstatic delight she might feel at Rehdon’s hands if he took her as his wife. She vowed to herself that if she could make him desire her enough, he would marry her, and take her from dreary and provincial Kuma to the splendor of Koramvis and the agonizing rapture of his bed.
It became plain to her, in the days that followed, that Rehdon was fascinated. He could not keep his eyes away from her and would stare at her for long spaces of time, during which she affected not to notice his scrutiny. At last she contrived to be alone with him, in a marble chamber where stood the ill-carved statues of her ancestors, and where no servants, who had made their own analysis of the situation, would dare to intrude.
“Ah, my lord,” she had sighed, “how beautiful Koramvis must be. How you must long to return to her.”
As always, his eyes hung on her face and body, and when she went forward to him, he caught her hands in his.
“Would you like to see Koramvis, Val Mala?”
“Yes,” she whispered, “oh, yes, my lord.”
He slipped his arms about her.
“You’re no more than a child, Val Mala.”
She pressed herself against him.
“I long that you’ll teach me to be otherwise, my lord.”
He could have had her there and then. There was money enough to recompense for her defloration. But her extreme beauty had ensnared him, and her trust, which was really her unthinking foolishness. In some ways he was a sentimentalist, and in the matter of women and his reaction to them, his understanding was limited.
So seduced was Rehdon that he married her, and set her higher than his previous consorts. In the wonderful white palace, at the feet of the Dragon Comb of Dorthar, he lavished a million gifts on her, but her marriage to him destroyed her expectations.
In the great, gold-embroidered bed, he had hammered himself into her, but such was Val Mala that the pain pleased her more than anything else he might have done. She had endured so long the arts of love without their culmination that agony was a delight in itself. When it was finished, she must have more of it. It was her avidity that frightened him. Rehdon was not a master; for all his mass, he preferred to be the seduced rather than the seducer, which was the reason for her success with him in the first place. Now he taught an unwilling pupil the role she must play, and taught her to hate and despise him in so doing. Despite all this, she was adept and skillful, and he grew to rely upon her. Presently she became his chief Queen.
It was ten months after their marriage that she began to withdraw her favors from him. When he craved her the most, she proved the most evasive. She forced him to cringe for the benefit of her body; she made him fearful, taking a wicked pleasure in the enterprise, all the time hating him the more because he succumbed to her whims. She was a child of fourteen, he a man and a king. She longed for him to silence her, take her and use her, although she did not truly understand these desires.
At last she turned from him to the riches her position offered—to the temptation of power, and to lovers, the most ingenious of whom was Amnorh. He proved very useful to her, not least as an assassin. But the best-loved was Orhn Am Alisaar, for he treated her as a whore and so, in some curious and appropriate way, fulfilled her utterly.
In the fourth month the snow was cracked like marble by the rain. Nine days later, under yellow plumes of rain-cloud, an army rode out of Koramvis with all the paraphernalia of war.
Atull of Yllum had been picked to lead it—a Dragon Lord formerly in command of one of the mountain strongholds set up on the borders of Thaddra. He was a man of some experience, tough and forthright, well used to fighting, yet in reputation obscure. To deal with a peasant rabble in the Lowlands he was the ideal choice.
That Amrek should lead the punitive force was barely considered. No king was required to swat this fly. This was as well, perhaps, for Amrek had been often ill (something seldom alluded to), and his rulings indecisive. It had seemed to some that he would have been afraid to return to the Plains. Was it the old shame, the cuckolding that made him sweat? Or did he believe the tales of Lowland magic and dread the lingering curse of the Plains woman Ashne’e? Believe that the Lowland King was indeed his father’s son?
Amrek, as he stood on the great stairway to watch them go, felt a nameless horror and despair whisper in his core. “I am impotent before a ghost,” he thought. He glanced at the woman behind him.
“Well, Mother, our brave captain rides out.”