Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

A copse of dark and ragged trees sprang suddenly up in front of them on the livid skyline.

“Pull their heads round,” Liun shouted.

“Do you think I’m asleep, you puppy?”

In that moment the world cracked open on a white and blazing void.

Lomandra felt a great cold heat rush by her like the breath from a demon’s mouth. She lost all sense of place and of self and seemed to be flying until a wedge of pain slammed into her back.

She discovered herself lying on the ground among drifts of dead leaves, the child at her breast. Her own body had cushioned its fall, but its face had screwed into tears. A white glare came and went on her eyes and then was blotted out as Liun bent over her.

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head, giving herself no time to think whether she was or not, and he half-lifted her to her feet. She stared about her wildly.

“Lightning,” Liun said brusquely. “It struck the trees and the team. You and I were pitched clear, and the brat.”

“And Amun?”

Liun’s face was set.

“His gods were sleeping.”

Lomandra looked away, unable to bear his stony grief. A dreadful guilt came down on her like the weight of the icy rain which was now pouring over them. She turned a little and made out the shape of the chariot trapped in the black and white flaring mosaic that was the burning trees.

“Don’t look.” He put a hand on her arm almost formally. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way to the town.”

One slope was very like another in the cloud-sealed darkness. Muddy banks ran up a little way, dripping with sparse wet vegetation, though the rain had stopped. Liun had taken the child from her, but she walked with that other irrational weight fastened to her body.

It was her guilt perhaps which made her unnaturally aware of menace in the gloom. For a long while she quivered with the knowledge and kept silent until at last the sensation became unbearable and uncontainable.

“Liun,” she said softly, “there is something behind us.”

It surprised and strangely pained her when he said: “I think so too. We’ve had company for about a mile.”

He put his free arm about her and did not turn to look back.

“What is it, Liun?”

“Who knows? Perhaps only a dust rat or two.”

The undergrowth was thicker here, steaming with moisture. Through the narrow stems she caught an abrupt and ghastly glimpse of light—a pair of incendiary eyes, first scarlet, then gold. He heard her gasp, but only glanced aside. Casually he said to her: “Take the baby, Lomandra. And get ready to run.”

She took the bundle from him in blind obedience.

“Tell me why.”

“Our admirers are dangerous.”

“What—”

“Tirr,” he said without expression.

She felt the blood abandon her heart and stood paralyzed.

“Then we’re dead.”

“Not inevitably. I can delay them and you can run for your life. A hero’s death. I never thought the gods had marked me down for that.”

“Liun—Liun—”

“No, my darling Lomandra. They haven’t left us the time.”

He pushed her. There was the sound of tearing foliage above, and a shape arrowing down. An awful screeching cry burst from the dark and stench filled her nostrils. She saw the bald flanks, the jutting face and the envenomed claws. A second cry sounded, and a third. Two others anxious not to miss their kill. And—though she knew he must die, this man who had thrown away survival for her, who she might so easily have come to love—she fled.

She ran on in nightmare, feeling death hanging on her heels, and far off, as she ran, she heard a no-longer recognizable voice calling out in agony.

At last she could run no more.

She fell and lay still and waited for a smell of corruption and a rending which did not come. The child whimpered at her breast, demanding milk she could not give.

There was an itching discomfort in her shoulder. Gradually, as she lay there, a dull and numbing ache began to spread across her back and upper arms. A little blood ran down her side. She did not remember a paw striking at her or the penetration of the single claw, but she saw now that her flight had been entirely useless after all.

The Xarabian got to her feet, the child locked in her freezing arms, a cradle of already annihilated flesh.

“You,” she thought, “you.”

But she did not particularly hate the child.

“Where shall I die? Which is the spot where I shall fall down and you at my breasts? And how long will you outlive me in these foul and empty Plains?” And again she thought: “It will die young.” And began to walk toward the moonless horizon.

All heat was draining from the year and the sky was like unpolished brass as the ten or so villagers followed Eraz to the temple. She lay on her death bier, very white and still, conforming like any corpse to the pattern expected of it, but her hair was still tawny for she was not beyond her middle years.

A hunter held up the front of the bier. Like all the rest but one, he was quite without expression. No Lowlander reckoned on longevity, for life was hard and mostly fruitless. But the young man who supported the lower poles of the stretcher was staring at the dead face, his own working with the effort not to weep.

It was the bits of amber in her ears. He had seen them gleam so often in and out of her hair; it was perhaps his earliest childhood memory. Now they moved him unbearably, and he did not want to shed tears in the midst of these people. They seldom if ever wept for their dead—he had never seen it. They showed no emotion: no pain, no sorrow and no joy. They. He tasted an old bitterness in his mouth, for though he was in part one of their own, yet he was a stranger and an alien. She had understood, Eraz, his foster mother, and she had given him what demonstrative love she could and such intimations of a locked-up sweetness.

They came into the grove of red trees and up to the black oblong of the temple door. Two priests emerged. They moved like lightless ghosts, one to either end of the bier, and took the poles from the hands of the hunter and the young man. Without a ritual word the priests bore Eraz into the gloom. The villagers stood immobile for a moment, then turned and slowly dispersed. Only the hunter, passing him, murmured: “She is with Her now, Raldnor.”

Raldnor could not speak. He found his eyes were burning and wet and turned his head, and the hunter moved away.

Soon she would be ashes mixed with the soil beyond the temple. Or would the essence of her truly rest in the arms of Anackire? The tears ran scalding down his face and left him oddly purged and empty. He walked away from the temple and began to retrace his steps toward Hamos, the village of his fostering, below the slope.

When he reached the little two-roomed hovel, he pushed the door shut and sat alone in the deepening shade of evening. Before, this place had been his home. Despite all differences and all self-searching, he had never questioned that. But now, now he questioned. Naturally he could stay among them, work in their fields as through the preceding years, hunt with them in the lean times, eventually tie himself to a wife and produce children. So far, from the few casual couplings, there had been no births. As well. They would not want another cripple in their midst.

He got up suddenly and went to the round of polished metal Eraz had used for a mirror and stared in at himself.

Vis.

Vis, for all the light gold eyes and the sun-bleached yellow hair. It was physically apparent in the dark bronze sheen of the skin, the tan which did not fade in the cold months, and also in the strikingly handsome face, the arrogant mouth and jaw that had no place set on a peasant. He was taller, too, than the average Lowland man, very wide in the shoulders, very long in leg and lean of hip. It was an unmistakable mark on him: this man was at least half-bred from a line of strong forebears who have never starved on the unnourishing acres of the Shadowless Plains.