Amrek stared at him.
More fire rushed through the air, lighting up the way ahead. Amrek saw a yellow-haired man come running out of the murk toward him with a masklike face, his sword raised.
“My first Lowlander,” he thought. “The first Lowlander I’ve seen this close.” But no, it was not so. Raldnor had been a Lowlander. Raldnor, his brother. And also—yes, a girl, long ago. A white-haired exquisite girl who had died quite literally at his touch, as if he were the incarnation of her death. As Raldnor would be the incarnation of his own. “This man running at me, this man should be Raldnor, bringing my death,” he thought suddenly, but the face was unknown and the raised sword falling.
A Guard had struck the Lowlander down. He fell under the wheels of the chariot.
Val Mala’s women scurried about her apartments, shrill-voiced with alarm, gathering up the costly clothes and priceless jewelry.
The Queen sat in her chair, twisting her hands with frustration and fury.
Amrek.
She was consumed by a final hatred of her son, a clawing paroxysm as she recollected everything—how she had carried him in discomfort and ugliness, her beauty subservient to his needs, how she had borne him in indignity and pain, how she had drawn back the birth robes and seen Ashne’e’s mockery irrevocably branded there.
It did not trouble her that she had at last destroyed him. She had never credited him with humanity; it had never been convenient for her to do so.
Today, she imagined, he would die, and after his death she saw the abyss opening in her path. Other sons of other, lower queens might take the throne, and their heads, and the heads of their mothers, she had anointed with her malice since the morning on which she married Rehdon. She visualized what they would do to her once Amrek’s body lay within the Hall of Kings. Already she had tasted the poison on her lips, experienced the stifling velvet pillow pressed to her sleeping face. This city could no longer be her home. She must abandon it as the rabble had done.
Beyond the long windows, the city lay burning and breathless in the coruscating sunlight. There seemed to be no sound in the world save the clamor which was all around her in this room.
Dathnat, the Zakorian, appeared in the arch-mouth.
“As you ordered, a covered carriage waits for you in the court below, madam,” Dathnat said. Her tone, as always, was precise and clipped. It gave Val Mala an uneasy comfort to know that this woman was totally unmoved. The elements of confusion and distress seemed to shrink away from her, afraid themselves that she would find them unacceptable.
“These fools!” Val Mala said. “They can do nothing. They have the wits of lice. Tell them to be quick. Tell them I’ll give them each a flawless jewel if they hurry.”
“As you wish, madam.” Dathnat’s eyes touched hers for a second. Val Mala met in them the hatred that had amused her once and which now sank into her breast like a weight of cold metal. She thought: “I am surrounded by enemies,” and saw no particular justice in it.
A smell of corruption breathed suddenly across the room. One of the nervous girls let out a shriek. Val Mala turned. The white kalinx stood in the arch. The Queen started; it was like an apparition of death to her.
“Take it away from me!” she cried. “Why isn’t it locked in the court? Which of you fools let it out?”
The women approached cautiously. It snarled at them and crept to Val Mala’s feet, staring with its glazed blue-bubble eyes. It rubbed against her, but she kicked it away.
The kalinx snarled again, aimlessly, showing brown teeth like rotten filberts. It was too old to defend the rags of its existence.
The rheum ran down its bald cheeks like tears.
The Lowlanders, after all, refused to die.
The Dortharians cursed the running fires and fog of smoke which their own catapults had created. The Lowland troops used the smolder as cover, ambushed out of it small groups of soldiers cut off from the rest and slunk away to hide in it when this work was done.
“They fight like tirr, the bastards. How many have we killed?” the captains demanded of their runners. No one knew. They came across bodies with yellow hair, yet there seemed somehow always more of the enemy among the trees, as if the dead replaced themselves by supernatural means.
“Banaliks come to fill their armor when they fall!”
A Dortharian was found screaming in a burning grove.
He whimpered that he had seen a thing pass—half woman and half snake. He had been drunk before the battle; nevertheless someone clouted him over the head to keep him quiet before the panic spread.
Somewhere, from the slopes, the brazen trumpets bellowed a withdrawal.
Sluggishly, the smoke-blackened, scale-plated men pulled themselves out of the trees, the Zakorians coming grim and orderly behind.
Amrek’s commanders crowded to him.
“Storm Lord, we’ve lost few men. The scum must be crippled, but there’s no way to tell in that trap. If we let the fires spread, we can drive them out into the open on the other side and take them cleanly.”
“Do it,” Amrek said. His Guard had served him well; there was not a scratch on him. Yet he seemed in a trance.
A last catapult delivered flame among the orchard trees.
The dragons drank wine as they waited above the smoke.
Glancing up at the blue-black sky, a man said: “No carrion birds. That’s strange.”
“Not enough to feed them of ours, and the skin and bone Lowland muck would stick in their gullets,” his neighbor answered.
Farther along the line, a boy, ladling from the wine pitchers, fell abruptly behind in his task.
“Come on, you. Get a bit of speed on.”
“It moved,” said the boy.
“What moved, you numbskull?”
“There! Look—” The boy pointed, and, staring down, his sergeant saw a tremor disturb the scarlet liquor, ripple and run and flatten out into nothing. He laughed.
“There’s a beetle got in, boy. Ladle up. One of our lucky lads’ll get more in his cup than he reckoned on.”
Yannul the Lan straightened and drew out his blade. The Zakorian, who had stayed behind to fight, crashed down into the bushes.
Now at leisure, Yannul glanced around. The smoke was full of dimly glimpsed figures moving all one way. The dragons seemed to have been called off to let them choke and roast at their own pace. He turned and ran with the general tide between the fires and emerged on higher ground where the smoke lay more thinly. Behind, trees crackled under their pall; beyond those was the glitter of the Vis troops in their immaculate squares, drawn up as before, and waiting.
A great stillness had settled over this place, though he could hear faint shouts and cheers from the Dortharian end of the valley, and the snap of burned wood in the orchards below.
“What now?” he said to the nearest Lowlander, wiping soot and blood from his eyes.
The man turned to him an ash-white face. “Now they die,” he said.
Yannul’s scalp shivered.
“You mean, I think, we die—once they leave off swilling and cheering, and come on.”
Just then the sky turned black as night.
Some of the Vis sections of Raldnor’s army let out cries and curses and stared up at it. The Lowlanders stood like blind statues, paying no attention.
Then there came a new sound across the valley. A sound like a colossal gong beaten underground.
The shadow of the black sky fell over the dragons, and their cheering stopped. In the thick stillness which followed, a man began to gibber. The animals tossed their heads, rolling their eyes and sweating.
“Storm coming,” a soldier said hoarsely. “Look how the trees’re thrashing about.”