Брайан Ламли - Khai of Khem

“Candace, majesty, please wake up! And you, magician—you, Imthra—rouse yourself!”

“What? Who is this?” mumbled the old man, shaken awake at last by none-too-gentle hands. He looked up from the cave’s floor and saw a young warrior kneeling beside him. The youth wore the insignia of a charioteer, but his left arm was in a sling. That was why he had not gone with the army three months ago, down from the mountains to do battle with Khasathut’s troops in the valley of the Nile.

“Wake up, Imthra. It is I, Harek Ihris. Up, old man, and bring the queen awake. A rider comes, two or three hours away. The mirrors signal his coming.”

“What? A rider? A messenger!” Assisted by Harek Ihris, the old man sat up. The queen, too, awakened by their excited voices, stirred herself.

“Candace,” Imthra wheezed, “a rider comes from Asorbes, from the battleground. Doubtless he brings news. The mirrors foretell his coming, which will be in a few hours’ time. At the onset of night, then he will be here.”

Ashtarta stood up and Harek Ihris assisted Imthra to his feet. They passed out of the cave into the cool air of early evening. Low in the western sky hung the ball of the sun, and away to the east something flashed briefly, brightly, reflecting the golden glow of the slowly sinking orb.

“See,” said Imthra, pointing a trembling finger. “The mirrors of our watchers speak to us with Re’s own voice.”

“Re is a god of Khem, old man,” the Candace sharply retorted, frowning. “And we are children of Kush. The sun is the sun, no more a god than the so-called ‘sacred’ crocodiles that the Pharaoh’s people also worship.”

“Just so, Queen,” the old magician mumbled his agreement, though deep inside he felt that there would always be a godliness about the blazing solar furnace. He turned to Harek Ihris. “You go on ahead, young man. We will follow in our time. We have things to talk about.”

As the young soldier started off quickly down the steep mountain path, Ashtarta called after him: “And when the rider comes, make sure he knows that he is to be brought straight to my tent. And let there be meat and wine ready....”

An hour later, as they neared the foot of the mountain—more a high, steep foothill than a mountain proper—finally Ashtarta and Imthra found time to talk. Until then they had saved their breath, assisting each other in those places where the path was at its steepest or its surface loose and treacherous. Now, as the slope gentled toward the tents of the encampment, which lay about a pool surrounded by trees, palms and green shrubs, Imthra asked: “Did you see anything, daughter, in the black crystal Pool of Yith-Shesh?”

She looked at him and frowned, then nodded. “Yes, I saw something— many things. But they were to me a nonsense. Come, Imthra, you are the magician. What did you see in the pool?”

“Candace, I—” He hesitated, then quickly went on: “But as I have explained, often the pool’s pictures lie, or at best they present an obscure or confused—”

“You saw evil, is that it?”

Imthra looked down at his sandaled feet and appeared to pick his way most carefully. “I saw … something. Its meaning may not be easy to explain. Therefore do not ask me, Ashtarta, for my vision would only disturb you— perhaps unnecessarily. Young eyes, however, often see far more clearly than old ones. What did your eyes see in the Pool of Yith-Shesh?”

For all that she was young, Ashtarta was wise. She did not press the magician for an answer but told him instead of her own visions. “I saw carts without oxen, without horses, moving fast as the stars that fall from the sky,” she began, her great slanted eyes filling with wonder. “The carts carried many people, all dressed in a strange and wondrous garb. I saw great birds that served these people, carrying them in their bellies without eating them; and ships that went without sails on the ocean, which were as long as the side of Khasathut’s pyramid! Aye, and I saw vast encampments greater by far than all of Kush and Khem camped together, with dwellings of stone taller than mountains and teeming with peoples of all kinds and colors in their millions. Then—”

She turned quickly, catching Imthra off guard, her troubled eyes searching his face. “Then I saw the general Khai, my future husband, who came to me as a boy out of Khem. Did you, too, see Khai, Imthra?”

“Khai? Khai the general? The Warlord?” He did his best to look surprised.

“Do you know of any other?” She peered at him suspiciously through silk-shuttered eyes, like a cat at the cautious pattering of a mouse.

“No, Candace, of course not,” Imthra mumbled. “And no,” he lied, “I did not see Khai in the Pool of Yith-Shesh. My visions were of no consequence compared with yours. Now please continue, daughter,” he urged. “Go on, tell me what else you saw. Tell me of Khai the general.”

For a moment longer, the Candace peered into Imthra’s lined old face. Then she relaxed and said: “There is little more to tell. He had wings; he stood on a green mountain in a wild, craggy and alien land; he flew. Then … something swooped on him out of the sky like a great hawk. He crashed to the ground. After that I saw no more.”

They were walking now through tufts of spiky, coarse grass between the tents. Directly in front of them, beside the springfed oasis pool, Ashtarta’s large, pavilion-like tent stood scarlet and gold in the last rays of the sun as it sank down between twin peaks. Silhouetted against the tent, whose color merged with that of her dress, Ashtarta’s flesh seemed almost green, exotically beautiful.

A handmaiden at the tent’s entrance bowed low and kissed the hand that the queen held out to her. Before entering, Ashtarta turned to where Imthra had paused. “When the messenger comes, you will bring him to me?”

“Of course, Candace.” Bowing, the old magician began to back away.

“And Imthra—”

“Majesty?”

“While we are waiting, perhaps you would give some thought to the meaning of my vision?”

“Majesty,” he bowed his obedience.

“And to the meaning of your own—” she continued, piercing him through with her gaze, “whatever it was....”

As the queen turned from him and entered into the scented luxury of her tent, Imthra bowed one last time, shivering as he felt the first chill of evening creeping into his old bones. He should consider the meaning of his vision, should he? Little need of that when the messenger, who would be here soon enough, would doubtless be able to explain it for him. And not, he was sure, to his liking.

So the old man turned away from Ashtarta’s tent and made for his own less sumptuous apartment, a low, black affair with four poles, numerous silver symbols sewn into the walls, and black tassels hanging from each corner. He supposed he might look into his shewstone; there might just be something to see in there, but he doubted it. His eyes were of little use now for the scrying of mysteries, and his mind not much better. As for the vision he had seen in the pool: what interpretation could he possibly place on it except the obvious one?

He had seen Khai, yes. He had seen him stretched flat on his back on a bed of funerary black, with baleful blue fumes rising from seven encircling censers while chanting wizards in strangely horned, pschent-like headdress performed an ancient rite. It was a ceremony old as time itself, come down from predawn days before Khem and Kush, Therae and Nubia, before ever the first tribes of the hills and valleys came from the East and the South to settle in and around the valley of the Nile. The time-lost ice-priests of primordial Khrissa had known it and the long-headed Lords of Lemuria—whose alien blood, it was rumored, ran even now in the veins of Khem’s pharaohs— and it had been practiced, too, in legended Ardlanthys.