Atlan saga omnibus, p.21
Atlan Saga Omnibus, page 21
He is the demon. He is the conqueror. He is the render, the destroyer, the faithless. He plans to destroy the world, attack the secret continent with the beautiful name and make its rivers—if it has rivers—run as red as his snake-skin in the lamplight, make its plains—if it has plans—lie as scarlet as his dragon-skin in the dusk. He plans to destroy and filthy Atlan, to turn against his allies who helped him break her, to straddle the world. He is the Enemy.
At the second kiss we were form against form. The snake’s tongue moved in my mouth. The fish scabbard tensed against my neck, his fingers brushed it sideways.
I was drowning again, but this time not in water, in darkness and it was scarlet.
There was a click. A voice suddenly screeched, “Oh you—”
There she stood, trembling with rage.
“My, my,” I said, “you’re wearing green.”
Her next sentence was postponed by surprise. When it came: “You breast-cursed manikin, what right have you—? My husband! With my own husband! This passes all bounds! You reach high indeed, behind my back! Get out! Go on, I said get out, get out! You shall be whipped for this because I trusted you. And now—!”
All the old cliches, brought out in shrill pink-faced sincerity. I would have run from the room, forgetting I was bare, but his hand stayed me by my wrist. He had not even risen.
“Lara,” he said, “I’ll spend my nights as I wish.” She stayed staring, so he said, “I mean that sometimes I enjoy change. We’ll discuss it in the morning perhaps.”
She said in a wondering whisper, “Are you dismissing me?”
He nodded lightly.
Her face was distorted. Even her nose quivered. I said, “Isn’t it rather bold to come uninvited to your lord’s bedchamber?”
“For such a sweet little honey-speaker to men as you are, your tongue and more than your tongue can be very sharp with a rival,” he said to me. He was amused. He was enjoying the presence of both of us.
“Someone told me what I might find here,” she said. Her anger had frozen by now. In the shadow only her hand moved. It clenched, rose a little, fell a little. I realized what it was doing. It was savouring the feel of the whip tomorrow.
“Yes, I know who told you,” I said. “This teaches one not to get acquainted with foreign bed-girls—or if one does so, to do so in a friendly way.”
I took my clothes from the bed and began to put them on. She watched in satisfaction, he looked annoyed and made a move to stop me.
“No,” I said. “I shouldn’t stop me if I were you.” I said it quite quietly. Suddenly I commanded all the attention in the room. I felt myself grow upon it. I pitched my voice softly, though my tone was clear-edged. “I have been used often enough by you. Take that as you wish, madam, it is true of him. I have been frustrated too often. I loathe you, monster, as much as anything has ever been loathed.” His face became mocking. He didn’t believe me. He poured some wine for himself. Suddenly his grin became incredibly twisted. I realized his face had slid before my tears. “You think I am a despicable little foreign-court-slut, honey-tongued and vicious.” The tears scalded down my cheeks. “I hate you,” I cried. My own voice sounded strange in my ears, not the cry of feminine rage it would normally have been but a cry as full of truth and desolation as if I had known what that night would bring me. “I hate you.” I sobbed and ran from the room. My knees felt not as running flesh and bone but as running liquid, and my sobs filled the night. My head was light, it was at a different perspective to my body. The shadows swung away across the marble and hangings and were replaced by the new ones. A strange creature ran across the stairs and then down them before me. As we neared the courtyard and the starlight pushing a silver air-veil down through its open roof the thing’s shadow stretched up, up the steps to catch my feet as itself fled away down before me. My ears were ringing, “The truth!” “The truth!” “The truth!” in clarion echoes swinging far and back again. In the courtyard a score of dark shapes similar to the one before me detached themselves from the shadows around the sleeping multi-fruit tree and the alive white-blue splashing fountain and darted away, scattering the perfume dreaming heavily on the air and pulsing it in waves against me. In panic I ran out, my muscles contracting and dilating as I had known they would, for I believed the shadows pursued me. My third eye saw a stream of them, behind me, all the shadows I had passed, the hanging shadows, the corner shadows, the marble shadows, the long shadows of the steps. But he was still up there, alive and drinking. Indestructible, the strongest nightmare. I dashed across the outer courtyard, full of shadows and starlight covering the paving, so that by the time I reached the gate I had skeins and tangles of shadow and starlight all clinging and tangled round my feet and ankles. Ooldra! Ooldra! (“The truth!” “The truth!”) I must find Ooldra and I would be safe. “Ooldra!” I cried for her arms, the tears were warm on my cheeks for her warmth. “Ooldra.”
I stumbled into the familiar blue tent which meant home now that I was no longer a child in the tower.
She shrank away from me. Slowly she shrank from me, holding out her hands palm outwards as if to ward me off. Gestures meant a lot to Ooldra. She made signs with her fingers and I stood there.
“You do not vanish. You are stronger now than I,” she whispered. “1 did not think you could be. What do you want to say?”
I did not even give my lost lamb’s cry of “Ooldra!” I knew now that something had happened which would not be put right by crying to Ooldra.
“What have you done, Ooldra?”
“If you do not yet know,” she cried, “I can get rid of you—” and she threw a powder on the fire and made signs through the smoke. I stood there. Her eyes began to glitter their silver.
“I’m alive, Ooldra,” I said.
“Is that all? So it is simply that the soldiers missed you. Never mind, they’ll be here again soon.”
“I haven’t killed Him, Ooldra. He, too. is alive.”
She came crouching close to me, looking in my eyes.
“Why, Cija, did you not kill him?” she asked softly.
“No reason. Just, I didn’t kill him.”
“You have bungled.”
“His wife came in.”
Her stance and appearance changed. “Then, my sweetling, this is nothing. There is tomorrow night.”
“I can’t try again. I told him I hate him.”
“A thing any girl could do, balked of her night.”
“I said it. It was the truth. He knew that. When I ran out he didn’t follow me. That is significance enough.”
“Everything can be retrieved, child,” she said. Her eagerness was too tense. “You must try again. Offer yourself, no pride matters.”
“It can’t be retrieved. Ooldra dear. Why are these soldiers you mentioned coming?”
“I told them you had gone to His room, but that I had found your dagger missing from its usual place and I feared for him.” “And they’ve gone to his room? And they’ll knock, and he’ll answer and they’ll find he’s not a corpse after all.”
“So, my child,” she said, sitting down again, “they’ll return here and find you.”
“Not much use to you, Ooldra.”
“Yes, I have proof anyway that you meant to kill him. Your knife is obviously new-sharpened. Apart from that, witnesses saw you sharpening it just before going to Him. The guard-captain will say he saw anything I ask him to have seen. Blob also would have said anything for me, but you made him worthless as a witness by bringing an accusation against him so that his evidence would be construed as malice. But the guard-captain—And it will be obvious to everyone that the entry of Lara was well-timed enough to prevent a murder.”
I thought again of the Southern girl Yle who had been the cause of Lara’s entry. She was another witness. She was well-acquainted enough with everything on me—she had noted the fish about my neck. She wouldn’t hesitate to say so.
“Your continued existence isn’t worth a surmise,” Ooldra said, pouring herself some water with one of those hands whose vibrancy I have so often loved. “If I can’t have both your death and his, at least I’ll have yours.”
“Why do you want me dead, Ooldra?”
“Why will I have you dead? Your father never loved your mother,” she said, smiling into the surface of the water. “They shared an infatuation once, when he was a boy. He has been mine for all the years since. We have had several children. When your mother is dead and he is Dictator I shall be First Lady of the whole country. I hate your mother, I have hated her all the years of your life, only less than I have hated you. I have moved well for this end and waited long. Now one of the deaths I coveted has slipped through my long-long-long-patient fingers but it was not yours.”
“Why did you want Zerd dead? If it was not from love for me, to see my birth-fate annulled, what was it? Do you love my mother’s country so much that you wish to avenge his depredations of it?”
“The ‘Dictatress’s country’! Pah! What He did to it was well done!”
There were sounds of marching outside.
I wanted to clutch her arm, for she was still Ooldra.
“Not long to live,” she said in a dreadful hiss, then waited amused to see my reaction.
I kept my face under control, which was not hard, I feeling as numb already as the soldiers could soon make me.
Then swiftly, breaking the link with her eyes, I turned and dashed from the tent.
I doubled back round it as soon as I was out, dodged the marching phalanx, ran head down between the numberless dark tents and the fires throwing their sparks and thrusting their smoke at heaven.
Blob’s short bulk stayed me. I cried out in new terror when I saw his face.
“Now, now, missy,” he said, “what’s to do? Is this the night she would set the guard on you?”
“You know?” I said. “Blob! Blob!” I clutched at him. “Can you save me? We are not friends but you would not see me murdered?”
“A swift knife is less pain than seven lash-strokes, missy.”
“It is more irrevocable, Blob!”
“Now,” he said, “she told me I’m ineligible as a witness now. I’ll not get any witness-pay. So you die but I get no profit. There’s hate between me and you, but I’ll not stand by profitless and see you killed unjustly and borne false witness against by avaricious false witnesses I’m not one of.” He whispered. “This way now.”
We scrambled past endless guy-ropes.
“Where are you taking me. Blob?”
“Just trust me, and shut your little gob. To get that bird of yours. You don’t want a fine creature like that to leave with the army tomorrow dawn and you not on its back, do you? Well, then.”
Blob went in to get Urns because his fellow-groom must not be able to say later that he had seen me.
Urns is not Sheg. There was no snarling and whining and coughing. He came quietly out with Blob who is good at birds, his great slanting red eye only glaring.
When he saw me his neck unstilfened and the half-raised crest went down. I went to him and talked to him and he turned his neck and thrust his beak between my arm and my left side as if it were symbolism of trust.
The little shadow now joining us is Narra.
“Narra!” I said. At Urns’ side we embraced. We ran together and irresistibly embraced without having meant to. I held her tight to me. I realized with glad surprise that she was straining me as tight to herself. The crooks at her elbows were as sharply angled as her little arms were bony.
“Stupid brat, why don’t you run away again? What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been up late till now, Cija, the lord Smahil asked me to take water to his tent and then he made me stay and drink to be with him and sing my Northern peasant lullaby to him. I hope he’s not getting worse again, so soon after being better. He was ever so fretful. I did wish you were there, we always used to nurse him together.”
“And you’re still up late. Go up to the girls’ room in the palace.”
“You’re in trouble, or you wouldn’t be stealing your Unis with him .”
She irritated me. “Go on up, Narra, or I’ll be cross.”
“You’d better hurry and/or shut up,” whispered Blob heavily. “Those soldiers’ll be after us here soon, and the regiments’ll be getting ready to move before dawn. We ought to be out of camp as soon as possible.”
“Cija—” She pronounced it Ceee-yah, drawing the whisper out in half-wonder-half-realization. The skinny fingers fastened painfully on my arm.
“Shut up, don’t listen to him, darling,” I said frantically. “He’s only waffling.”
“You’re leaving, you’re in trouble! I’ll never see you again! Oh, Cija, Cija, don’t leave me. By All the Gods you mustn’t leave, I’ll never see you again, don’t leave me—1” And she said it all in the darkness, only her hands clutching at me, the little-girl’s voice whispering, muffling her fast sobs. “Cija. Take me with you. Oh, take me with you.” She whispered very low, afraid of embarrassing me, but saying it out of despair. “I love you.” She couldn’t control her frightened sobs now. “Take me with you, I promise not to be a nuisance, I can cook, you know I can, you’ve tasted it, I can sew—”
I heard marching.
It might have been the slaves coming to pack up the tents ready for leaving, it might have been any soldiers, it might have been the guard of Ooldra’s latest dupe. Narra’s sobs were hysterical now. I pushed my hand over her mouth. I thought of leaving her in the entourage now that she had known friendship and could know loneliness after it. I pulled her sideways to the ground behind a tent, throwing myself on top of her. Blob jerked Urns with us.
The marching passed.
Peeping, I saw the captain of the guard, looking significantly grim, a sword unsheathed in each hand. His men were orderly behind him.
Blob pulled me out, shoved me up on Urns. I’m a tolerable bare-back rider and Urns’ll take any sign from me, but that wasn’t the point. “Another bird for Narra!” I said.
“I can’t,” he said.
“We’ll need one! It’ll be miles alone through the mountains, take weeks maybe. And one for yourself.”
“I’ll get some mules later. Come on.”
He put a hand on Urns’ neck to guide him by, as there was no rein, but Urns jerked the hand off.
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“He doesn’t like to be touched,” I said. “You go ahead and I’ll make him follow.”
Grumbling, Blob showed us the way and Narra pattered on behind. A narrow stony way that was presently a rocky ledge led swiftly aside out of the camp and out of the town too. Remembering that I had once been told Blob rated me a poor rider, I made Urns go as fast down that ledge as Blob could lead, and presently he had to drop behind us, panting and wearing. I had no fear for Unis’ footing and balance, he’s as sure and swift and wily as a thoroughbred forest bird can be.
At the foot of the ledge Blob had to take the lead again. The stones and rocks were difficult to negotiate in the dark, and some of them were dangerous. Blob got himself cut by unexpected points, and once a boulder lop-balanced on another toppled. Narra yelped and gave one wail and won savage, whispered curses from the groom and I was afraid her foot had been crushed. But apparently she had not been seriously hurt, only hurt, and she limped on after us till I recollected myself and had the sense to give her Urns.
There were pools soon, as well as patches of grass, between the boulders; we splashed into them and emerged dripping. The water weeds tangled and left leafy souvenirs in our sandals.
When the sky was still black, but in the blackness before the dawn, we looked back as the first of the thousands of tiny lights approached uneven along the cliff road above us.
“It’s them,” I moaned.
“Ah, shut up,” said Blob, “wasn’t the army leaving at this time?”
There was soon the harsh sound I knew so well, the stirring aggregate sound of the moving army.
“You were too late,” I said, “to get those mules.”
Up above us, endlessly, passed the torches, the curses of men and leaders and riders, the clop and the clip of hooves, endless marching boots, rolling rocks, kicking boots, rumble of wheels, crick and crack of whips, creak of carts, barks of birds, neighs and snorts of horses, coughs of mules, resonance of metal. Still the army passed above us while we crouched down at the cliff-foot, among the boulders, and the little wind that skirls always before the dawn fled skirling after the darkness, and the darkness melted away leaving the stars till last. Big, big white stars; and you could see the smoke of the paling torches snaking up between them. It was still dark, not yet grey but less violently black. You could not make out the separate sight of these things above you, but you knew they were there. Up there He went, Zerd, the beautiful Enemy. Up there, went the playing entourage, the pink princess, the winegirls, the pages, the grooms. There went Zerd’s faithful commanders. There went the hostages’ carriages. There went Ooldra, unless she had already embarked on the long-planned magic of her miraculous escape. There went the men, all the regiments I knew, all the trundling dusty life I had grown into for months and which had grown into me, the only life I had ever known outside childhood’s tower.
