Robert Adams - The Death of a Legend

“Why, Lord Vlahkos Kamruhn of Skaht, Vahrohneeskos Gneedos’s younger brother, though still weak, stands in this very throng today, when we all had thought this time yesterday that we were wise to start gathering wood for his pyre. Nor is he the only one; Captain of Freefighters Tyluh, though not really conscious yet, swallowed some thin broth for Master Elmuh this morning.

“And,” Mikos then asked, “did my lord thoheeks not tell us all when we joined him on his dash westward that the High Lord informed him that the Ahrmehnee Stahn will be joining this Confederation of ours?”

All Bili said was, “Yes, Lord Mikos.”

“Then,” asserted Mikos, “what sort of allies would they think us Ehleenee and Kindred to be if we proved more interested in getting quickly back home than in helping them to drive an old and serious menace from their border?”

Then the crowning shock came to Bili of Morguhn. Another chorus—this one all of Confederation nobility, every man jack of them!—of vocalized agreement and quite a few mindspeak beamings from Kindred confirming full assent to the words of Mikos Eeahnospolis smote ears and mind alike.

Never before, in all of his dealings with them, had he experienced or even heard of any aggregation of the hot-blooded, fractious, often-brawling Confederation noblemen agreeing on anything, not if given time and leave to “discuss” the issue. Even in the deadly serious meetings of the war council of the High Lord during the march upon Vawnpolis and the subsequent siege, it had often been all that the High Lord, the High Lady, Sir Ehd Gahthwahlt, the ahrkeethoheeks and Bili could do to keep steel from being drawn and used by the proud, stubborn and temperamental thoheeksee of western Karaleenos. What had just occurred here, this morning, was completely unnatural!

Despite the incense smoldering atop the coals in the many braziers, the room already stank of death to any with senses unclouded by drugs, but the big old man on the big wide bed still lived, though only the movements of his chest and the occasional flutter of an eyelid gave such notice.

But Bili of Morguhn was not presently in that ancient, injured dying husk on the bed. He was in the young, strong, healthy and vibrant body of the country nobleman he once had been: Bili, Thoheeks and chief of Clan Morguhn, who had fought through the whole of the Great Rebellion with the High Lord Milo and the High Lady Aldora, and had gone on into the bitter campaign in the Ahrmehnee Mountains… and then even farther west into uncharted lands and dangers.

What had brought him back to this weak and dying hulk of aged flesh and brittle bones? He had been happy back there, back then, reliving again the prologue to the most exciting period of his long career, those months of bitter sweet memory, nearly seventy years ago. Then something, someone, had called him back to the present, summoned him back into the wreck that old age and injury had made of that once-mighty body, now slowly sliding into death.

Then it came once more, a tentative, questing mental probe. It was familiar, or once had been so; if only his mind were clear…

“Bili? Bili of Morguhn? My dear love, do still you live?”

He forced open his veined and sticky eyelids. He could discern little in the smoky dimness of the bedchamber, but could still see well enough to feel certain that no one had joined him here in this room of imminent death. A ghost, perhaps? Piffle! Even with his great and most unusual extrasensory abilities, he never had detected any such thing and was of the firm opinion that ghosts—if they existed at all—existed in the minds of the living. In the mind… mindspeakl “Who calls Bili of Morguhn?” he beamed with a power still undiminished by his physical debility.

“You do still live then, my dear, dear, old love.” There was relief in the dimly perceived beaming. “I… I had feared that… that I had waited too long, my Bili.” “My lady… ?”

“Yes, love, it’s me, Aldora.”

“Please forgive me for worrying you, my lady. It’s the drugs of the Zahrtohgahn, they ease pain but also serve to cloud the other senses, to greater or lesser degrees. And, too, I… my mind was a-joumeying far back in time, to the time just after the Great Rebellion, when…”

“Oh, yes, my dearest one, I think that those were the last truly happy years of my long, long life. Those precious years when you and your little children lived with me in Kehnooryos Atheenahs.”

“I had not relived so far yet, my lady. I was still in New Kuhmbuhluhn with Prince Byruhn, the Kleesahk and… and my Rahksahnah.”

“Yeeesss… ?” Acid dripped from her beaming. “It is interesting that the near-final thoughts of a man I—Aldora Linsze Treeah-Pohtohmas-Pahpahs, the Undying High Lady of the Confederation and the Sea Isles—honored with my love and favor for most of his life, should be of a manhating, half-Ahrmehnee slut he knew but for… how short a time was it, Prince Morguhn?” “My lady, my lady,” Bili tiredly remonstrated, as often before in the long, long ago, “even when I told her of you, of what you and I had together shared, Rahksahnah never resented you, nor did she ever speak ill of you. Why then do you still so resent and vilify a long-dead woman whom you never even met during her lifetime? Why, my lady?”

There was a note of repentance, of regret, in her next beaming. “Why, Bili? Do you not know why? You should, if great age truly imparts great wisdom… which old saw I tend to doubt, and on far better grounds than most could produce.

“Because I love you, Bili. Because frustrated women become bitchy, and I have nurtured my love and harbored my I frustration for more than three score years. Because that nasty mixture of love and frustration, that unbearable turgidity that my soul became when I finally faced the fact that soon or late I would lose, would be forever denied him that I so loved… so love, even now… seems to find and enjoy its fullest release by striking hurtfully at my very love through one that I know he loved, then lost.

“Dear, sweet Bili, I truly, truly am sorry for what I said. I do not—have never done so—hate your Rahksahnah or resent her. May Wind grant her repose in His Home… I right often wish truly that I might soon be vouchsafed the sweet blessing of death, that we three—I and you and your Rahksahnah, too—might ride the endless plains of the Home of Wind. I could even share you, my Bili, did I but know that we would never be parted, that the one could never outlive the other for the rest of eternity.

“And when I dream again those happy, hopeless dreams, I think that the old Ehleen blackrobes were right, even more right than they could have imagined. We Undying are cursed—really and truly cursed, though not in the way those vultures meant the term—to live endless years without one to love, that is the curse, Bili, to be fearful of allowing oneself to bestow love as Nature intended it be bestowed, that is both foul curse and eternal damnation.

“Within bare weeks of our first meeting, Bili, I had come to love you far more deeply than ever before I had loved any man—and I was older than you now are, even then. Milo saw it, knew it for the soul-deep love that it was and tried to warn me of the certain agonies it would surely breed; and I knew deep within me that he was right, too, but who ever could argue an effective case against so powerful an emotion as love?

“When I could not raise your mind, could not farspeak you for so long a time, while you were in New Kuhmbuhluhn, I was forced to reluctantly agree with the majority opinion, that you were dead; and, although my grief was almost insupportable, I could still not help feeling in a way relieved, relieved that your untimely death had thus ended something harmful to me that I would not have been able to muster the courage, the resolution, to end finally and for all time while still you lived.