Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

It was hunting alone, then. He was arrested by its unexpected beauty and its colossal size, for this one was two wolves made into one. He had heard hunters’ tales of similar monsters, mutations of strength, but never seen one before. Its massive head would reach as high as his ribs. But such grace it had. He caught the dull calculating flash of its eyes, and its open mouth looked full already of blood.

And then it seemed he toppled into its black primeval brain. Dark, ancient, elemental, a dank forest full of merciless things, steaming swamps and torpid rivers, where sudden sparkling drives and lusts darted and flamed.

It leapt at him, but he had seen the diamond firework of its thought. His hand moved even as its glorious body slammed against him and its stench and insolence choked his throat. He buried the knife to the hilt in the eye of a demon which went immediately out.

He lay then very still beneath the coverlet of the wolf, racked with an abrupt impossible sorrow. Buried by its magnificence, he could only mourn. It was presentiment. There was a sound of distant voices shouting in his head. He opened his eyes and saw the girl Anici kneeling by him on the street, her face a rigid mask of fear for him. He smiled at her and, thrusting aside the corpse of the wolf, sat up and took her hand. “You care for me, then, do you?” he thought, and she hung her head, for there was no longer a bolted door between them and her mind was open for him to invade all the fragile private dusts and dreams inside it. He felt as though he walked on a splintering crystal, entering her mind, and a protective tenderness surged through him.

He got to his feet and, still holding her hand, drew her up also. Then he lifted the dead wolf in his arms and glanced at Orhvan and at Ras.

“Something else to sell in Xarabiss. This pelt should fetch a good price.”

Ras’s face was blank; Orhvan looked at him, wearily nodding. They sensed how he had usurped them.

To begin with he had turned his back on Xarabiss. Now there was a craving in him to cross the border into Vis lands, to find towns seething with life, and dark-haired women resembling his lost mother. It came on him suddenly, he was not certain why, the day after he had killed the wolf and skinned it of its beauty.

Orhvan took two days hiring a wagon and two zeebas from the lower alleys of the city. Ras and Raldnor fetched the many-colored weaving from Anici’s house, the wreck of a palace haunted by the girl’s grandmother. They left Mauh here also, sniffing after rats among the fallen columns.

The old lady seemed suspicious of Raldnor. She snatched Ras’s sleeve and whispered at him, and Raldnor’s face burned with anger. He followed Anici into the ruinous garden and caught her hand.

“Come with us to Xarabiss.”

“No. I couldn’t leave her alone here.”

“Surely there’s someone else who could look after her, and Mauh would be protection enough.”

She hesitated, her eyes lowered. He sensed a malleable quality and said: “I want very much for you to be with me.”

She looked into his face, and her loveliness and innocence brought his heart into his throat. She was very precious to him; his ability to enter her open mind, the look of love in her eyes, were salves for his bitterness. She was his link with his people. He did not want to lose her even for a month.

“There is a woman in the third house,” she said tentatively.

Later, as Ras and he walked back across the streets, Ras broke his silence to say: “We’ve spoken hard to each other, you and I. I saw the way she looked at you, and I was envious. My fault, Raldnor. I ask for peace between us now, and wish you both happiness.”

Unexpected warmth moved Raldnor. He made his own verbal reparations, after which they were friendly enough, though Ras’s friendship was subdued and reserved, in the manner of the Lowlanders.

They traveled under blowing dark roofs of skies, and at night ringed the wagon with fires. Once they saw tirr crossing a plateau beneath, and Raldnor felt old implacable hatred rise up in him, thinking of the dead Xarabian woman and that lost finger he surmised they might have bitten off.

They drove most of the day, taking this task in turns, huddling at dusk to eat by the fires. In the dark of the night he would lie awake and listen to Anici’s breathing behind the curtain she stretched midway across the wagon. They were all too close for him to go to her. He wished there had been more sexual complicity between them, for then it might have been managed. The Vis sex in him was hungry for her, the hunger made more greedy by every day spent in her presence, seeing the look of shy loving in her eyes. Even the sounds of her soft breathing inflamed and curdled in his loins. And yet he had had nothing from her except those gentle and unsatisfying kisses, for she was very timid and nervous—a delicate, difficult pupil of his desire.

On a day of harsh silver light they crossed the border and reached Sar, that small Xarabian town so near to which the Hamos man had found the dead woman and her child.

Their permit was shown at the gate, yet the sentries seemed indifferent, and there were many yellow-haired people moving about the streets. At the town’s center a terrace climbed to a small shrine dedicated to the wind gods who beat about the hill, and near this place they found cheap lodgings.

Raldnor lay on his back in the male dormitory he, Orhvan and Ras had settled for, while two or three prostitutes plied their trade from pallet to pallet. The bestial grunts and mutterings of the Vis about him both sickened and excited him. At last, seeing his companions asleep, he got up and slipped out of the long room, following the narrow corridor to the tiny cell where Anici had been housed.

He thought she might have barred the door, but she had forgotten.

Inside the room he stood a long while looking down at her as she slept. Moon shafts described her body and her drifting hair. He woke her with the softest touch of his mouth, yet she stared at him in fear.

“What is wrong?”

“Nothing, darling Anici. Nothing.”

“Then why are you here?”

Her naivety served only to increase his need. He sat beside her and stroked her cheek, then took her face in his hands and kissed her, no longer with the familiar childlike kiss.

She did not resist him, but she gave a series of tense nervous shudders, and when he let her go, she began to weep very softly to herself.

“I’m afraid.”

“I won’t hurt you, Anici. I only want you to be happy. I want to share what I feel with you.” And at once he found the stale words again in his mouth from those endless courtships at Hamos—stupid, superficial sentences masking a lust, always impatient, now virtually agonizing. He found he could not bear to drone through those ritualistic phrases again, not with this girl with whom he had mingled thoughts. He moved close to her and began to caress her trembling body. She lay like stone and merely suffered him, and suddenly a rage took hold of him that he could not keep control of. He gripped her shoulders and snarled: “You forever say you love me. I think you lie to me.”

“Oh, Raldnor—you know my mind—how can you say these things—”

“Then you’re a child. They kept you a child in that pile of ghosts and ruins.”

The tears ran down her face and ended his patience. He found he despised her, hated her passive endurance. He felt that urge come on him that was like a possession—the Vis part of his body ravening to be free. He experienced a total loss of will to it.

When her hands came thrusting at him in terror, he held her more cruelly, and his brain was flooded by her frenzied inner cries. But she was no longer anything to him except an object that in some obscure way represented all the frustrations and tortures of his life. He remembered only partly that she was a virgin, and so, while he did not exactly force her, yet it was an effective and bloody rape. And not once did she cry aloud, only inside her mind, and it was these cries that finally brought him to his senses. His horror then at what he had accomplished was the more intense because he himself had done it. For it seemed to have been another man, a man he would hunt out through the byways of the inn and beat to a pulp. He held her and tried to comfort her, appalled by her anguish and her blood. And as he grew more panic-stricken, she faded into an empty and desolate calm.