Танит Ли - Anackire

Across the room. Rem abruptly beheld the merchant’s agent, standing with his mouth open at Yannul.

Yannul intercepted the look. He rose, and the young man rose, no longer protesting, only very still.

“If you change your mind, the innkeeper here knows my farm, and how to get there. Four miles from Amlan, and the grapes are potent. Think about it.”

The wolves were busy on the slope above the ice, tearing something in shreds between them. Rem knew what it was. The child.

Kesarh stood at his elbow, watching the wolves.

“It’s nothing to me,” Kesarh said.

The wolves lay down, growling, chewing. Blood made smoking ribbons along the ice.

Kesarh had gone. Yannul’s son stood where Kesarh had been, and he said softly, “It’s all right. It’s just a dream.”

Rem woke, sea-salt-wet as from the ocean off Lan, and almost as cold in the hot close night.

He had not had that dream for years. It had happened a great deal in the beginning. Ever since that morning, new in Lan, he had woken to find the girl and the child were gone, and, stumbling across the hills he met the men from that little village, out on their wolf-hunt. They had taken him in, cared for him. But they had seen no woman, no baby. The wolves had preyed on them terribly through the snow. The deduction was blatantly there for him to make, if never spoken.

Eaten alive, that fully cognizant, fully helpless being. . . .

Rem got up. He went to the window and looked out on Amlan, the late-burning lamps, the five tops of the palace.

Yannul’s son arriving in the dream, that at least was different.

Yannul’s son.

At the boy’s age, Rem had been breaking necks to steal purses. Lur Raldnor wanted to break necks to save the world.

The vision madness coming back tonight, when he thought himself free of it forever, had shaken Rem. Odd that, at last, the picture had brought with it some information. Who had he been at that moment in the boiling square, black jungle behind him, the man who had served with Yannul, somewhere? The obvious idea was bizarrely ridiculous. The obvious idea was that he had been Raldnor son of Rehdon and Ashne’e, Raldnor Am Anackire, the Lowland messiah.

Days went by, and no work offered itself. No merchandise was going to the port of Amlan, and the only caravans faring south had their escorts fixed. Five of Rem’s men asked leave and went off in the same direction, having families in Lanelyr. On the other business, the continuous, pointless search, a man came to the inn and stood in the courtyard with Rem.

“I heard you were trying to trace a woman and a child, sir.”

“That’s so.”

“I’ve come out of my way here.”

“I’m sure you have.”

After an unfruitful silence, disgruntled, the man said, “There’s a woman in the far north, a Karmian.”

“Yes?”

“She’s got the child, about seven years old, a mix child, very fair.”

Rem never moved. He had been brought similar facts, or lies, before. Sometimes he followed them up, and never found what he looked for.

“And the child’s male,” he said.

“No, a girl.”

“Did you speak to the woman?”

“Yes. But I didn’t tell her you were looking.”

“How did she seem to you?”

“A bit simple,” the man said. “Slow. But good-natured enough. And the child was bright.”

Rem felt his belly tighten.

“And the limp,” he said.

The man frowned.

“The child?”

“Or,” said Rem, “the woman.”

The man licked his lips, decided.

“Yes, sir.”

Rem laughed. He did not realize the devastating darkness in his face, something he had learned, perhaps, from Kesarh. The man, who had found out some of what Rem wanted but not quite enough, blustered, scowled, and soon hurried away, without reimbursement.

Rem walked the streets, through the market. He looked at the palace, like a sightseer. Yannul, Raldnor’s captain, had once ridden all the way through the long snow to persuade his King and Queen, then children, to ally Lan with the Plains.

Yannul had married a Lowland woman, they said. And between them they had formed the glorious son who wanted to go to Dorthar.

Dorthar. Dragon land. Land of the goddess, now.

A man passed on the street. He was like Yannul’s son, but only for an instant. Lur Raldnor, do what Rem would, was very much in Rem’s mind. And no other thing, even by night, had come to divert the image. Rem was wary. The boy was young enough still to be at an age when sexuality was fluid, therefore corruptible, therefore to be avoided. In all his life, despite several contrary opportunities, Rem had never sought the company of any save those he could take for pay. But then he had also, in that way, grown accustomed to proximity without culmination.

Nevertheless, it was another midnight, another day, before he got his directions to the farm and rode out of Amlan toward it.

It was hardly just a farm, more a villa, built, he supposed, on Dortharian lines. The blue hills held it, as they seemed to hold everything of note in Lan, and mountains gleamed far behind in the ultimate hour of the sun. Orchards and vineyards clustered near the house. An orynx herd trundled grunting and splashing in a valley with a stream, zeebas peered from pens, and gray bis fled squawking and flapping across the outer yard, long ringed necks outstretched.

“Splendid,” said Yannul when they met in the coolness of the house. “We eat early here. You’re just in time.”

They settled the questions of routine and pay over the dinner table. Yannul’s Lowland wife, soft-spoken but shining in a dress the color of her hair, helped the two servants serve the meal, then sat down with the family. Lur Raldnor was away, on a hunt, after the wildcat that had been raiding the orynx herds of the area. A much younger son, all gold for his mother’s side save for his black eyes, listened and took part in the conversation without precocity. He had the exact sound blend of couthness and dash apparent in the older boy.

Yannul and Rem ended playing a Lannic board game on the terrace in the afterglow. When the light was almost all gone, Yannul joined his servants haphazardly in kindling the lamps. Up in the sky, the Red Star was also kindled.

As Rem won the first leg of the game, Yannul said, “And I take it your mother often struck you.”

Rem started.

“Excuse me,” said Yannul, “if that’s too raw. But I noticed you flinch when Medaci tapped the boy’s hand on its fourth trip to the fruit bowl. A joke, a love-blow, no more.”

Rem was discouraged at himself to have let slip so much. He said nothing now, and Yannul went on, “it’s a cruel time for her. She loves them both, but Raldnor’s her first-born. We never thought she’d bear, after the life she had in the old city, the Lowland ruin. For a long while she didn’t. And she and he, they’re like lovers, the pair of them. Not in the Lannic way, just love, you understand. If he goes to Anackyra, she’ll pine. Yet at the same moment, she wants him to go, to fight, to stop the creeping dark. And she’s afraid, too. We remember, you see, what it was like before.”

“And what was it like?”

“Oh, you want all the military history in a nutshell, do you?”

“You must be used to that.”

“Why else,” said Yannul, “am I hiding here? I had a year of war, and then a handful of years playing politician in Dorthar. That was enough for me. To return and be Lan’s heroic monument wasn’t my design, either.” A moth had come to die in their lamp and with great gentleness and the excellent coordination of the acrobat and juggler he had been, Yannul caught it and threw it lightly free, unscathed by flesh or fire, back into the night. “Raldnor had the best idea. He disappeared.”