There was a great silence on the camp. The Lowlanders moved as ever in their passive unemotional way; over the Lans, Elyrians, Xarabians and those of mixed blood a vast quiet had descended. Until now they had ridden on an adventure—with a stirring of the soul, with luck and trickery, with a chance, also, to turn back. Now, confronted by this ultimate symbol, Koramvis, they sensed what they had done, and they, like the Dortharians, were numbed by it. They had reached a supreme, an unthinkable goal. And thereby given it power to destroy them.
Koramvis, the beautiful and the strong.
Yannul, as he honed the blades of long swords in the glare of crackling flames, visualized the wide gates opening in the new day, spilling the might of Dorthar.
“They were waiting, lazy, letting us come to them for the plucking,” he thought. “There should have been help from Shansar and Vathcri with us, Tarabine men marching over those mountains to take the Dragons from the back. But a traitor ran to Koramvis, and now no other man will come. Death in the morning. A few hours away. Gone beneath the hooves and the chariot wheels. Made into dung to fertilize their blighted fields, carrion for their birds to eat. Oh, creamy-breasted Anack of the Plains, why bring a man so far to die?”
Yannul glanced about. A Lowlander was at his shoulder.
“Come,” he said.
“Come where, and for what?”
The Lowland man pointed. Men were leaving their fires. Lans and Xarabians, leaving their women and the spoils they had snatched from Kuma, moving up beyond a line of orchard trees, out of sight.
“What’s up there?” Yannul asked, his scalp unaccountably prickling.
“We go to pray.”
“To pray—ah, no. I’ll spend my last night alive in other sports, many thanks.”
The Lowlander said no more and walked away after the others. Yannul turned back to the pile of weapons.
The crackle of the fire became very loud. The sky darkened, and the last flush of flame on and over the mountains guttered out.
Yannul’s back began to crawl. He slung down a sword with a curse, got up and stared about. Even the women had gone now. Only an empty slope remained, dotted with little fires.
He went up after them, in among the trees. In the dark, men stood in a union of vast soundlessness.
“Pray,” Yannul thought, “to what? To Anack?”
Then he felt the curious whisper in his brain.
He started. Could they invade Vis thoughts now? But no, this was something different—an awareness only of the humming intensity all about.
Will. Why call it prayer? Prayer was their instrument; they used it like cloth to fashion a garment, like the stone he had used to sharpen blades.
“Well, I, too, can will to live out tomorrow.”
It seemed quite natural then, the linking of his consciousness with those about him, in a common cause of self-preservation, though the air sizzled and thrummed as if before a storm.
Under the torch-lit gate of Koramvis, a covered carriage rolled toward the valley plain.
Within the musty dark, Lyki snapped shut her eyes. All this, she knew, was a game to Kathaos—more fascinating in the irony and skill than in likelihood of success. She gnawed her lip in a sudden extremity of fright. “May the gods damn him!” She felt her heart twisting in on its own raw blackness of anger and fear.
When she opened her eyes again, she saw Ras on the wooden seat opposite her. His face was like white enamel, and she wondered if he could see hers as well, for the darkness of her skin.
“Why are you doing this, Lowlander?” She had tried to keep all pleading out of her voice, but her tone betrayed her. At first she thought he would not answer, but then he said, quite gently: “I hate him. I hate Raldnor.”
“Do you hate me too?”
“You?” He stared at her as if seeing her for the first time.
“If we do what Kathaos wants, I’ll die. They’ll kill me.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said, but there was no malice in his voice.
“What about the child? The child will die too.”
“Raldnor’s child.”
In a sudden gesture of defense, Lyki drew the child close to her, shielding it with her arms. She had carried it inside her and labored harder to bear it than she had previously labored at anything, and now a man who knew nothing of pregnancy or birth brushed away its little span of days as lightly as a feather. She looked down at its swarthy dreaming face, the black curls like wisps of fern clustering on its broad, low forehead. They had given it a medicine to make it sleep, to shut its strange, accusing eyes, and muffle its demanding mouth. She bowed her head over it, absorbed once more in her own bitterness.
Many years before, another court woman, whose name had been Lomandra, had come this way, down this pale road, from Koramvis, carrying a child in her lap.
Almost an hour passed, marked by the faint creaking of the carriage, the uncertain rumble of the wheels as they left the road and took to the hilly paths between the cibba groves and drought-blasted fruit trees.
At last the carriage came to a halt, and the silences of the plain gathered around them. Their driver jumped into the grass, dragged back the curtains and stood waiting. He put out his hand to Lyki to help her, and his mouth was crooked with contempt. She longed to spit her venom into his face. She thrust off his hand and pulled her mantle about her until it hid both her and the child. Beyond the trees she saw the red suggestion of firelight. Suddenly her limbs seemed to dissolve and she felt as weak as if death had brushed her—but not from fear alone.
The Lowlander took her arm—a casual, deadly touch. They began to walk.
At first the enemy camp seemed deserted. No movement or sound emanated from it. Then came a sudden burst of singing over the slope, and hands clapped in a Xarabian dance, and there was laughter.
She marveled at their confidence on this eve of death.
Suddenly there was a guard silhouetted in front of them against the fire haze; he was carving a stick with his knife.
“Who’s there?”
“Peace, friend.” Light slanted on Ras’s hair. The Lan relaxed, showed his teeth and stood aside for them. He winked at Lyki’s averted face.
“As good a way as any to wait for a battle.”
Irrationally, Lyki felt fury seize her, because the sentry imagined that she had given herself to this thin pocked man. Then the camp was all around them. There was the smell of food cooking, and steam rose from iron caldrons slung over countless fires. It was now a place of dimly seen movement, vaguely heard voices, smoke going up, animals cropping turf at their pickets, everything blurred together by the smearing flame light.
No one spoke to them.
At the head of one of the tent lanes, a deserted fire was burning in a circle of stones. Cibbas grew thickly here, casting a dense shadow. Ras went to the hearth and seated himself. Meat bones lay whitely in the grass, and scraps of bread from a finished meal. All around the camp, the orchards and vineyards ran in seared acres under the blistering stars. Lyki thought for an instant she might slip away when Ras took his cold eyes from her. Yet she knew that he would never look away, would never allow himself to be distracted.
“Why do we wait?” she asked eventually.
“There will be men in the tent with him—Yannul the Lan, and the Xarabian; some of my people, maybe. When they leave him, I shall see them go.”
She looked about them for some Commander’s pavilion, but all the tents were the same.
“Which is his tent?” she whispered.