Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

He said suddenly aloud: “Why was I moved by the death of a woman who wasn’t my mother?”

For his mother had been a Xarabian, he knew. A man of Hamos had found her near dawn, a few miles from the Vis town, Sar, which perhaps had been her destination. A beautiful woman, he said. She lay on her back with the last wisp of moon hanging over her like a drop of milk. There was an oozing tirr scratch on her shoulder and a mewling baby held tight in her arms.

In memory of her they had given him a Sarish name. But she had marked him already. It was her ancestry betrayed him. Yet he had a Lowland father, for his eyes and hair spoke of that. He thought of the woman with disturbed emotions. It must have been a casual Vis mating, for the dark races shunned the Plains people by all accounts. And she had left him a dreadful legacy. Her Vis sex, for one. He, like they, roused irresistibly at the coming of the Red Star. It had been the dreadful shame of his childhood till Eraz had explained it to him. Later it sent him prowling like a wolf through nights of sleepless blind desire when every dream was an unsatisfying frenzy. The girls of the village, unsensual at any season and quite immune to the Star, cost him endless effort, each coition preceded by intolerable seduction. That he gave them pleasure he only knew by the almost grudging soft cries wrung out of them on occasion. He felt they went with him from pity, and were amazed by the effect he produced on them, and every coupling was ultimately soured for him, for it was basically unshared, and he to himself seemed bestial once the Star had faded.

Yet this legacy was not the worst. It was his crippling which was hardest to bear. At the remembrance of it now, here in the dark hovel, he smashed his fist against the metal mirror in senseless anger.

He was both deaf and dumb. Not physically, that was, but in his mind.

They, the pale-skinned people all about him, could listen to each other’s thoughts, project their own. There was a silent murmuring always about them, like invisible swarms of bees. And he stood, unconscious and mute, on the fringe of their society, a tolerated idiot—outcast, not by them, but by his own deformity.

Outside, above, the white pitcher of the moon poured black night into the sky.

A wolf howled faintly across the distances of the Plains.

Soon it would be cold. Snow would come. Thick stockades would be dragged about the village, and they would be trapped within until the second thaw.

Resolution came on him suddenly. He took from the chest the thick cloak of wolf skin, and from the wall hooks his hunter’s knife and the pouch of small copper counters that was the sum of Eraz’s wealth. He felt like a thief.

There was no one else about in the night. He strode along the straggling earth road, up the slope, by the temple, and away toward the south.

“Where are you going?” he asked himself.

Not to Xarabiss, certainly. Automatically, it seemed, and resentfully he had turned his back on the north.

Something came into his brain.

Somewhere ahead there lay the ruins of a city, a Lowland city, Eraz had said, a relic of a past completely blotted out. Why not there, then, to this hulk of the Shadowless Plains.

He felt insecurity and liberty mingle in a peculiar sensation for, whatever else, he was free. He would not have to endure again and again the same excluding faces; at least now they could be different ones.

And he grinned as he walked, at his pleasureless joke.

He lived where he could off the wild, shunning the occasional impoverished signs of habitation. He kept toward the south. He became lightheaded at his journey—this sloughing of all responsibility—and the city assumed vast metaphysical proportions.

After about nine or ten days he came to a hovel with an old woman outside it. She was patching a garment, her long colorless hair hanging over her face. He asked her for a drink of water from the well, and then about the city. She pointed without words, southward. So he went on.

“A mirage,” he thought, “a phantom I don’t even see.”

The winds blew very bitter.

He had never been so long alone.

It was early dusk and there were leafless trees. He came out of them and looked down and saw a shallow valley set in the slopes, already swimming with shadow. And in the valley and the shadow a progression of shapes—runnels, channels, flat projections—like something a child might build out of the rain-moist dust. The City.

He did not believe in it at first. He began to walk down into the valley, expecting at any moment that it would vanish, a trick of the fading light. But it grew more solid and more real. Quarried black Lowland stone like the stone of the temples.

Half a mile away, it occurred to him that no sound came from the city, no light, and not a puff of smoke showed. It was deserted then—quite feasible considering its dilapidation. Still he went on. A great ruinous wall loomed presently above him, and the vault of an open defenseless gate. He went into the gate, and was at once almost overpowered by a sense of enormous age and enigma—the city’s personality.

Beyond the arch a stone terrace led down in broad steps to a dim, shadow-filled square. His boots sounded on the stone, and a purple gust of birds flurried up from the dark into the sky, startling him.

As he crossed the square, there was a flicker of sudden light from under an arch-mouth. A woman with a tallow lamp and hair like the lamp flame was drawing water from a well. She did not look at him. So, there were inhabitants after all, lairing like beasts in the ruins. Well, he too could make a lair.

He walked the cold oppressive streets as the white embers of stars formed in the sky. He saw no other living thing abroad, though bird wings sometimes fluttered on the tops of ancient houses, and now and then he made out a trembling obscure light behind narrow latticed windows.

The moon was rising as he climbed the steps of a dark palace.

Sitting, leaning against a pillar, while the moon splashed white on the cracked mosaic of the floor, he ate the last meager ration of his fire-cooked meat. Shadows slid all about the roofless hall. They were very deceptive. He did not for a long while see that one of them was a man.

“Don’t be alarmed,” the figure said, moving forward into the moonlight, “there’s no need of your knife.”

He was in middle age, wrapped in a ragged but serviceable cloak, and at his heels padded a black velvet beast with glowing eyes.

“Sit, Mauh,” the man said, and the beast sat. “Yes, she is indeed a wolf, but mine since birth and therefore will do you no harm.”

“Then you needn’t fear her harmed,” Raldnor retorted sharply. “I’ve killed wolves often.”

“Yes. So much is evident.”

The man squatted by his animal and looked into Raldnor’s face. Although plainly a Lowlander, his countenance was unusually open, promising to be expressive.

“Your mind is shut to me, and you are dark-skinned,” he remarked after a moment. “Perhaps that’s why you’re here. There are many mixed births in the city. Men with light eyes and dark hair, blonde-haired, black-eyed women.”

“You give sanctuary to misfits, then?” Raldnor said sardonically.

“‘You,’” the man repeated, considering the word. “There is no collective ‘you’ in this place. No Authority. In the temple villages there are the priests, but here—here there is only the city. We are all a scattering, all strangers to each other. Why did you come up here?”

“To eat,” Raldnor said shortly.

“This is the palace of Ashnesea, a princess who ruled before time as we know time. You see bits of her still there in the mosaic on the floor, musing with the goddess.”